Weeks Hall: Art Student in New Orleans and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
When Gilbert Hall, William Weeks Hall’s father, died in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 9, 1909, Weeks Hall and his mother Lily Weeks Hall traveled with the body back to New Orleans for burial in the Metairie Cemetery. They then took up residence with two sisters, Miss Emma and Miss Florence Zacharie, in their twenty-two-room house at 1227 Fourth Street.
Within a few years, Lily became ill, and for the last seven years of her life, she moved back and forth between the mountains of North Carolina and New Orleans, always under the care of her nurse, Moyse Anderson.
Weeks Hall’s attendance at school must have been sporadic, as he attended two schools in New Orleans with a break of one year in North Carolina after a summer’s bout with typhoid fever in The Crescent City.
Basically, Weeks Hall boarded with the Zacharie sisters during the school year. “I was going to high school and lived apart from my mother and my aunt with two old Creole ladies who never spoke to each other except in words of the highest blame. The fact that one was almost totally deaf made no difference to the other.” It must have been a strange life for the teenager.
Weeks Hall painting outside, c. 1915-1920. From the collection of the Shadows-on-the-Teche.
For whatever reason, Weeks Hall never completed high school, though he excelled in elocution and read avariciously. His talent for art, recognized even as a boy in New Iberia and Jeanerette, was also deemed special by the Art Association of New Orleans, who awarded him several scholarships to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Weeks Hall attended the Academy from 1913 until 1918.
It is this period of his life, from age 17 to 22, we have very little information as almost no letters survive to tell of his experiences in Philadelphia and New York.
In 1917, Weeks Hall’s mother wrote to the New Orleans Art Association, enclosing a check in the amount of $50.00 for a lifetime membership in the organization for her son. Showing her support for the painting career chosen by Weeks Hall, she also wanted to express her gratitude for the Art Association scholarships which had allowed him to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, considered to be the best school for the arts in the United States at that time.
Samuel Weis, president of the Art Association, replied to Lily on her birthday, August 3, 1917, and wrote what must have been very gratifying to her. “The Association has done for your son what we feel he has richly deserved by the manner in which he has conducted himself at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts [sic]. It is our purpose to continue to take as lively interest in him as his merit deserves.”
A Daily Iberian article, published on October 30, 1961, by Frankie Hebert on the grand opening of the Shadows, included the following quote from Anna Ingersoll, a fellow student and friend, whose remembrances of Weeks Hall help fill the void in what we know about his time at the Academy.
“Those of us who were friends of Weeks Hall at the Academy were very fortunate, for he was not only a delightful companion but had a knowledge and sophistication about what was then modern painting that left most of us far behind….
He had a tiny studio always clean and tidy, full of records and art picture books, the latter not easy to come by then. Weeks came and went very irregularly as no attendance was required. But at the end of the month when a certain amount of work had to be turned in, he always brought the necessary number of canvases—and they were better than those of anyone else. Of course he won all the prizes and traveling scholarships there were. I have to two of his canvases of that time. Extraordinary work for a student.”
Some of those canvases done for class are in the Shadows’ collections, including two fine studio nudes and a landscape titled The Flooded Graphite Mine, which Weeks Hall gave to Ingersoll. She exhibited this “extraordinary work for a student” in the Eighteenth Annual Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans in 1919.
Looking back on those early years at the Academy, Weeks Hall once recalled, “Sometimes I like to think that my living ghost is still there now in the corridors of the school, as I was then. Especially at the night sessions when it was snowing outside. My own group was robustly cynical but sympathetic. The blank and virgin canvas of the future was before us all, and in it there lay a kind of security which painters later never find.”
Originally published in The Weeks Hall Centennial Year pamphlet. The Centennial Year celebration of Weeks Hall’s life ran from October 1993 to October 1994.
