HAROLD WESTON was born on February 14, 1894, in Merion, Pennsylvania, but his real life began—according to the evidence of his memoir—when his father took him up Mount Marcy for the first time, at the age of nine. “Well I do remember the sound of the trees during that night, that sound peculiar to upper reaches of the timber line,” he wrote almost seventy years later.
One of the major figures in twentieth-century American art, Weston drew his inspiration from the Adirondacks and was compelled throughout his life to depict the images and sensations that struck him so vividly and aroused his deepest emotions. His experiments took him from landscapes and nudes, through portraits and still lifes, to abstract reflections on the universe in small things.
