Weir seems to indicate in his published Recollections that he began An Artist’s Studio in West Point during the summer of 1862 and returned during the summer of 1863 to finish it, but in an early manuscript of the recollections he wrote that he carried the unfinished canvas with him when he moved to New York in 1861 to set up his own studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building. In a manuscript list of some of his works Weir indicated that An Artist’s Studio was painted in 1863 and 1864.