The wings of a butterfly: pastels by Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Asked by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the autumn of 1923 if he would agree to an exhibition of his pastels--placed adjacent to the museum's biennial paintings display--Thomas Wilmer Dewing flatly declined the invitation. "I seldom make [a pastel]," he asserted to the Corcoran's director, C. Powell Minnigerode (1876-1951), "and [then] only as a preliminary study." (1) He doubted, furthermore, that there were two dozen of them still in existence. There were none in his studio and he did not know where any could be found. When Dewing finally did allow the exhibition to go forward, he was startled when the museum quickly assembled fifty-three of "these little gems," as Minnigerode called them. (2)

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Dewing's reaction is a bit of a mystery, for he had, in fact, been producing pastels for over thirty years, and generally they were not preliminary studies for larger works. The artist's letters show that his pastels were clearly independent works of art, although in later years he did sometimes use pastel to work out poses to use in his paintings. Still, the pastels stood apart from the larger canvases as tour-de-force drawings that focused his intent more quickly than was possible in oil. Pastel produces a powdery line that shimmers and glows, resulting in a jewel-like opalescence that one artist friend of Dewing's compared to the wings of a butterfly or the petals of a flower. (3)

Dewing first took up working in pastel during the early 1890s. Boston-born, Paris-trained, and an established artist resident of New York City, he would hardly have missed James McNeill Whistler's first one-man exhibition in the United States, held in March 1889 at H. Wunderlich and Company. (4) The widely heralded display was entitled 'Notes'--'Harmonies'--'Nocturnes' and it contained oils, watercolors, and most important for Dewing, pastels. While many other artists used a large format for these works, often spreading pigment over the entire surface of the paper, Whistler was more economical in his application, employing color sparingly and leaving large areas of the surface untouched so that the dark-toned paper functioned as part of the design. Viewers marveled at this approach, one that instantly seemed revolutionary. (5) It must have inspired Dewing to take up the medium himself, for he quickly adopted the new aesthetic, keeping his works small and featuring only one figure as Whistler often did. And like Whistler's, his works hint at the surrounding environment by just a mere suggestion of a table, a chair, a fan, or a musical instrument.

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Dewings earliest known pastel, a dainty figurative work similar to Whistler's undraped nudes, has recently come to light (Fig. 3). Although listed in the artist's daybook with the date 1890, it might have been done in 1893 when he sold it to Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), the Detroit railroad car builder who was his most reliable patron and would over the years purchase forty-two of his works, including thirteen pastels. (6) The woman depicted is likely the saucy strawberry-blond model Julia Baird (1872-1932), who was famous for her slim adolescent figure. Dudie, as she was called, sat for many pastels in the early 1890s when Dewing and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) joined forces to offer free life-drawing classes in the basement of the residence at 3 Washington Square North that Dewing shared with his wife, the well-known still-life and portrait painter Maria Oakey Dewing (1845-1927). (7)

Dewing's works from this period show his willingness to experiment. In some, such as Sappho of 1894 (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), the nude figures are crisp and angular and framed against an unadorned background. In others, in particular The Pearl of about 1894 (Freer Gallery of Art), they are soft-edged and enveloped in color. (8) An ability to work in various styles at the same time characterizes Dewing's career as a draftsman, for each of his pastels is individual and distinctive in appearance, despite superficial similarities of pose and costume.

Dewing first met Freer in 1890, shortly after the latter had returned from a business trip to London where he had visited Whistler for the first time and purchased etchings and lithographs as well as a pastel called Harmony in Blue and Violet (Fig. 4). (9) For Freer, art was "not a luxury, but a necessity," as he once wrote. (10) By the time Dewing met him, the captain of industry was already a noted print collector. He also owned a small group of American paintings and was becoming interested in Japanese art. Ultimately, he would unite American and Asian art under his roof in what he termed as "members of the same spiritual family." (11)

Freer and Dewing quickly became a team, the collector helping his protege purchase supplies, and the artist acting as the patron's buying agent in New York City, where he scoured the shops for Japanese prints to send to Detroit. He also located for Freer tanagra figurines, small terracotta statuettes recently discovered in first- and second-century archaeological sites in Greece, which may have suggested to Dewing how to feature classical dress in his own work. (12)