to classical records on his Victrola phonograph. Weston's first solo exhibition was at the Montross Gallery in New York City in November 1922. He showed over one hundred oil sketches from Persia and the Adirondacks and 63 oil paintings, each of which rested in one of Weston's hand-carved and gilded frames. Critics heaped praise on his vibrant use of color and the unique American perspective he brought to his work. The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the show was the highlight of the season: "In his pictures [there is] something different, something stirring and magnificently bold, a proclamation of a bigger belief in beauty than is usually heard in the galleries." Landscape Nudes Weston met Faith Borton while giving a slide lecture about his experiences in Persia at Vassar College. He was impressed, and invited her along with his sister and friends to his cabin for a mid-winter party. Borton, raised Quaker in the suburbs of Philadelphia, was good-natured about the primitive experience in harsh winter weather. Hundreds of persuasive letters from Weston followed, until eight months later she relented. The couple was married on May 12, 1923. For the first two and a half years of their marriage the Westons lived in the cabin studio—which now boasted indoor plumbing, a living room, and a bedroom—in the Adirondack Mountains. The period produced a significant change in Weston's work, that turned away from the landscape of nature toward the landscape of the human body. The catalogue Wild Exuberance: Harold Weston’s Adirondack Art describes the paintings: "The nudes deviated from a long tradition of beauty that aspired to perfection. These were no Botticelli or Titian Venuses, but cropped body parts painted as if with earth and flesh, whose primitive honesty complicated beauty with uncomfortably raw emotion and sex. These were not tame, pastoral scenes through which one could take a bourgeois stroll, but the wild. Unlike pretty nudes displayed for the male gaze, these were something more about the woman herself." The series of paintings came to be known as "landscape nudes" after John Marin said, "I feel the woods and the mountains in these nudes." Alfred Stieglitz considered the nudes daring and new, but they were too radical for the Montross Gallery to exhibit. In August 1925, Harold Weston was hospitalized with a diseased kidney, which was removed, but he suffered a month of high fever before starting to pull out