Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Susan A. Hobbs

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Maria Dewing painted her large tour de force A Rose Garden (Pl. IV) during the Dewings' last summer in their beloved Cornish garden, where the carefully tended beds stretched from the roofed veranda of the house to the drive (see Fig. 5). The painting has a wilder quality than the French-inspired A Garden in May. There is no hint of an organized garden. The viewer is immersed in foliage of thin transparent petals and leathery leaves. Crowded and cloistered, the work recalls Burne-Jones's Briar Rose paintings. But the touches of vibrant red suggest new growth, while animating, undulating shadows reveal hidden blossoms. The artist won a bronze medal for this painting and for Carnations (Pl. VI) at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York.

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When the Dewings left Cornish in 1902 they spent several unsuccessful summers on Long Island before establishing a new vacation place in 1905 near relatives in the Green Hill section of New Hampshire, just on the Maine state line. In their "Paradise in Maine," as Maria Dewing called it, (34) they had two hundred acres of woods and a barebones shack without plumbing where Thomas Dewing liked to cook on a primitive stove. They managed to carve a pair of gardens from the woods, and one day they planted masses of poppies that Maria Dewing painted (Pl. VII). Except for the canvas on the frontispiece and in Plate II, this is the only poppy subject she ever did, and may well have been the single garden painting she produced in Green Hill. Both she and her husband complained about how hard it was to paint in that "wilderness of mountains and forest and streams." (35)

It is little wonder, then, that Maria Dewing turned to studio still lifes such as The Rose (Pl. V), "a life-size" canvas, as she called it. It is reminiscent of her husband's work. But while his themes remain mysterious and subtle, her approach is direct, accessible, and dramatic.

In the spring of 1907 she staged a solo exhibition in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which included a broad array of early and late works ranging from studio still lifes to garden subjects and figure works. The show prompted one critic to write:

Here is a woman who has gone out into the fields and gardens and painted her floral models with such keen appreciation of their decorative value with such a nice sense of color composition that she has produced decorative canvases of the highest order--things of beauty which it would be a pleasure to have on one's wall. (36)

Large and ambitious figure works followed. (37)

Yet, despite her grand plans, the great 1913 Armory show in New York City brought European modernism to the United States, changing the artistic climate in which she worked and making her figure studies less appealing than they might have been before. So, with one exception, she presented studio still lifes for her second solo show at M. Knoedler and Company in New York City in 1914. Their striking quality prompted Cortissoz to declare that the artist inhabited "a place apart in American art," due to her originality and her authority. (38) The still life entitled Spring Flowers (Pl. VIII) shows that she was not afraid to experiment, even with a conventional subject.