In this members online event, Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, discusses Robert Weir's painting, The Greenwich Boat Club. The 1832 cholera outbreak in New York might appear to have little in common Weir’s carefree painting of bourgeois sociability, yet it resulted from that deadly event, when residents fled the city to escape contagion. The painting depicts one such expedition while revealing how environmental conditions can affect art’s appearance and meaning.