Vincent Nicolas Francis Joseph Weiss (known as José Weiss) was born in Paris in 1859 as a son of Jean Fréderic François Weiss and his wife Sylvie Marie Josephine Talbot. Though of German surname, his father was of French stock from Alsace (which had become German in 1871) and his mother of English background. Whether directly so is unclear but it is likely he spoke English as well as French from childhood. He showed early enthusiasm for painting, in which he was largely self-taught, but his father did not encourage it as a profession so he first went into the wine trade and was soon making frequent business visits to England. On one such, probably about 1890, he took a short leisure break in Amberley, Sussex, where he painted a picture of local scenery that sold for £12 at the Goupil Gallery, London. This made him realise he could live by painting and he settled in Amberley to do so by 1893, when he exhibited two works (£7.7s each) at the Society of British Artists and a third at £5.5s in 1893/1894. In 1894 he married an Englishwoman, Agnes Mary Ratton (1872–1906), at St Edmund’s, Houghton, near Arundel, and they first lived at Meadow Cottage, opposite Amberley station. In 1897 they moved to Houghton House, Houghton, where he spent the rest of his life and became a naturalised British citizen in 1899.
Weiss became a successful artist, best known for Sussex-landscape oils painted in a usually bright and freely handled modern style influenced by the Barbizon school, and with a debt to Constable on occasion. He showed 33 pictures at the Royal Academy from 1894 to 1919 (except in 1896, 1902, 1906 and 1909–1910). It may have been 34 if – as implied by Graves – he was also the ‘Joseph Weiss’ who submitted ‘Twilight: Forêt de Montmorency’ from Roubaix, northern France, in 1887. Most of his titles identify either Sussex locations or nowhere specific and only two abroad, in France, both at the RA show of 1907: ‘Picardy marshland’ and ‘A village street in Normandy’. He appears to have avoided figures: none appear in the 21 examples on Art UK and only one includes animals (sheep). He reportedly gained a wide clientele, notably in the USA, and his work is also held by public galleries in Dublin, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Chicago, St Louis, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg.
Weiss’s observation of birds in flight, especially how they maintained stability, prompted his serious experimental interest in aeronautics, on which he spent such spare money as he had in designing and testing models of gliders of bird-wing form at various scales from 2 lbs to 200 lbs in weight. He was a member of the Aeronautical Society and in 1905 won a medal in Paris for the longest glider-model flight at the first aviation congress mounted by the Aero-Club de France. The performance of his two models there is credited with diverting Louis Blériot from his previous sole interest in powered biplanes to monoplanes, in one of which he was the first man to fly across the Channel in 1909, and with influencing the Austrian Franz-Xaver Wels’s design of the Wels/Etrich manned glider of 1906 and powered monoplane of 1910. He also exhibited at the British Aero Club’s show at the Agricultural Hall, London, in 1907 and became well known in Sussex for flight experiments that he conducted from Houghton Hill and Bury Hill, both near his home. He constructed a large model-building workshop at Houghton and a prominent steel launching ramp on Bury Hill in 1907/1908. By 1908 he had also developed a wholly stable man-carrying glider. On 27th June 1909, a 17-year-old volunteer called Eric Gordon England made what is considered the first-ever ‘soaring’ flight in it, lifted upwards by the wind rather than just gliding down from height. Subsequent flights lasting up to a minute were all without accident, despite England having almost no control other than slight capacity to steer by shifting his weight.
In 1908 (and 1913 in the USA) Weiss registered a patent on his bird-inspired wing-form, and published and spoke widely on the subject. He gained initial interest in his ideas from the British War Office and in June 1908 formed the Weiss Aeroplane and Launcher Syndicate to exploit his design. (Sir) Frederick Handley-Page, subsequently a major aircraft manufacturer, was a financial backer, gaining the right to use the Weiss patented wing and displaying a Weiss experimental glider on his stand in the 1909 Aero Show at Olympia.
Although the industrial development of biplanes was by then overtaking Weiss’s approach, he persisted with monoplanes and built two powered versions with his wing-form, which he tested (piloted by England) on Littlehampton Sands and at Brooklands in 1910 and 1911. Both flew but led no further and he reverted to work on ‘ornithopter’ gliders, partly with a Scottish medical neighbour, Alexander Keith. In 1914 this led to another patent taken out with him.
As a pacifist, Weiss was horrified by the use made of aircraft in the First World War but his interest and connections in the field continued to his death on 11th December 1919, aged 60. He was buried with his first wife in the Roman Catholic churchyard at Houghton Bridge. His widow, the second Mrs Agnes Mary Weiss, survived him until 1962. In 1929 she was granted a state pension of £50 p.a., raised to £75 in 1939, ‘in recognition of the pioneer services rendered to the science of aviation by her husband, the late Mr Joseph Vincent Weiss’. In 1934 a knowledgeable writer in Flight magazine (5th July) characterised him as an amateur aeronautical genius ‘whose work has not been sufficiently appreciated’ and an ‘artist of no mean merit’. For a consistently attractive painter, although not one pushing boundaries the way he did in aircraft design, he also seems surprisingly unremembered.
From internet sources cited in Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Who painted this river scene?’, especially http://project.littlehamptonfort.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Jose-Weiss.pdf
Text source: Art Detective
