Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Susan A. Hobbs

Oakey and her young colleagues considered the exhibitions at the National Academy of Design stodgy and dominated by older members, so in 1874 they organized a sketch club in New York City, primarily composed of women. La Farge came down from Newport to join them, and he urged them to hold their own exhibition, which they did in the spring of 1875 at Cottier and Company in New York City. (13) This exhibition is considered a kind of salon des refuses that set the stage for a new art movement in the United States. A few years later it led to the founding of the Society of American Artists in New York City.

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Oakey went to Europe in mid-1876 to study with the aging French master Thomas Couture (1815-1879). She also visited England and Italy, probably in the company of Bartol, before returning to New York City in December. (14)

By 1880 Oakey had set about establishing herself as a painter of life-sized figures. She sold Girl with Violets of 1878 (unlocated) to the writer and diplomat John Hay (1838-1905), and her efforts were successful enough for the critic Samuel G. W. Benjamin (1837-1914) to write in 1880, "Miss M.R. Oakey [is] among the leading artists who are aiding the new art movement in New York." (15) In July she took a suite of rooms in the new Sherwood Studio building at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, an up-to-date and luxurious address for artists. In July 1880 the Art Amateur described her high prospects and her reputation for "life-size figures" and portraits, which she had shown in Boston, Saint Louis, London, and New York. (16)

In October 1880 Thomas Wilmer Dewing arrived in New York from Boston and appeared on Maria Oakey's doorstep with an introduction from mutual friends. Goodlooking and full of ambition, he swept her off her feet. At thirty-five she decided to marry Dewing, then twenty-nine, perhaps sensing in him the same dedication to art that drove her. The couple were engaged by Christmas 1880 and married on April 18, 1881, in an Episcopal ceremony.

She continued to paint and exhibit largesized canvases. Her Mother and Child (unlocated) dates from the year after their marriage. The subject was very much on her mind, since the couple lost an infant son in 1882. (17) A trip abroad in 1883, with a visit to the studio of the English artist Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898), took them away from their tragedy. Once back home, Maria Dewing curtailed her own work to help her husband by painting the backgrounds of his prize-winning compositions. Hymen of 1884-1886 (Cincinnati Museum of Art) and The Days of 1886 (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford) established her husband as a premier New York figure painter and gained him full membership in the National Academy of Design. (18)

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Maria Dewing herself remained outside the art establishment, a factor mitigated by the long-awaited birth of the couple's only child, Elizabeth Bartol Dewing, on November 26, 1885. In June 1886, at the invitation of their friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), who lived there, the Dewings traveled to Cornish, New Hampshire, for the first of what turned out to be eighteen summers. They rented and then purchased an-eighteenth-century farmhouse where at last they could indulge their love of gardening. There too Maria Dewing produced the finest works of her career. paintings of flowers growing in the garden. She was not alone in rendering living flowers, but she made them her special subject. Abstractly composed and brilliantly executed, the paintings were "modern" works--the term she used in her ledger to differentiate outdoor paintings from studio still lifes of flowers. (19)