Arthur Wesley Dow

LC pulled from AAm website 8.17.18
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts into an old, established New England family, Dow received his first art training in 1880 from Anna K. Freeland of Worcester, Massachusetts. The following year, Dow continued his studies in Boston with James M. Stone, a former student of Frank Duveneck and Gustave Bouguereau. In October 1884, Dow followed the path of many native painters of his era, and departed for Paris.
"Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts into an old, established New England family, Dow received his first art training in 1880 from Anna K. Freeland of Worcester, Massachusetts. The following year, Dow continued his studies in Boston with James M. Stone, a former student of Frank Duveneck and Gustave Bouguereau. In October 1884, Dow followed the path of many native painters of his era, and departed for Paris.

In the French capital, he enrolled at the Académie Julian where his instructors were Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Among his fellow students were John Henry Twachtman, Willard Metcalf, and Edmund Tarbell. While abroad, Dow spent his summers in Pont Aven, Brittany, in the company of the Americans, Benjamin Harrison, Arthur Hoeber and Charles Lazar.

Dow returned to America in 1887. A year later, the first solo exhibition of his work was held at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston. After spending another summer in Pont-Aven, Dow settled in Ipswich in 1889 and began to hold private art classes. Soon, however, he moved to Boston, where he became interested in Egyptian and Aztec artifacts, which he saw at the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts.

At the same time, he began to study the prints of the Japanese artist, Hokusai. He sought out the curator of Japanese art at the Museum, Ernest Fenollosa, who shared his view that art should be both pictorial and decorative and introduced him to the other masters of Sumi ink painting and woodblock techniques. Soon after meeting Fenellosa, Dow developed a method for making woodcuts that reflected his study of Japanese techniques. He found the subjects for his prints mainly on Boston’s North Shore, which he felt were well suited to the Japanese-inspired appreciation of nature that he sought to express.

In 1893, Dow was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts under Fenellosa. Two years later, he gave a lecture outlining his ideas on Japanese art, which became the basis for his popular teaching manual, entitled ""Composition,"" which was published in 1899. As this text was used by public schools, it served to disseminate Dow’s ideas broadly.

Dow later wrote additional books on design including ""Theory and Practice of Teaching Art and Constructive Art Teaching."" Dow also had an active teaching career. He taught first at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then at the Art Students League in New York and, finally, at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In his teaching, Dow emphasized abstract concepts of line, notan (chiaroscuro) and color in order to arrive at a synthesis of eastern and western thought. His famous pupils, Max Weber and Georgia O’Keeffe, carried his methods even further into abstraction.

After 1900, Dow maintained a studio in his native Ipswich and conducted summer classes there. The nearby marshes and the area of Bayberry Hill were frequent subjects of his landscapes. His work in print mediums took up most of his time during the first decade of the century but, when he returned to oils in 1907, he began to experiment with a brighter palette and more expressive brushwork.

Dow died in New York on December 1, 1922. His work is represented in the Amon-Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Boston; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Columbia University, New York; Ipswich Historical Society; the Ipswich Public Schools and many other public and private collections."