Thomas Wilmer Dewing, an artist against the grain

Magazine Antiques, March, 1996 by Susan A. Hobbs, Barbara Dayer Gallati

Lady with a Mask [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED], for example, displays subtle disharmonies in the model's ungainly pose, her wary glance, and the painting technique. Although from a distance the picture appears gray in tonality, close examination reveals a variety of sparkling hues ranging from green to turquoise to pink, with occasional flashes of red. Dewing's application of pigment, particularly his use of broken brush strokes and reflected complementary colors, clearly demonstrates his talent as a colorist and his awareness of impressionist innovations. However, although Dewing is often included in discussions of American impressionism, his problematic relationship with the movement has not been thoroughly investigated.(3)

Dewing's opposing needs were a desire to be accepted and admired by the artistic community and a determination to remain apart from it by virtue of his unique approach to art. His lifelong penchant for enigmatic themes of isolation may have been rooted in the circumstances of his youth. Born in Boston to parents whose fortune was in rapid decline, he was from the beginning an outsider.

His father, a paper manufacturer, was an alcoholic who died when Dewing was twelve years old. As a result, he grew up with little money and no formal education. Due primarily to the financial sacrifices of his elder brother, Charles, he was able to study at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1876 and 1877 under Gustave Clarence Rudolphe Boulanger (1824-1888) and Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911). Upon his return to Boston, he taught at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts until, in 1880, he moved to New York City, where he lived for the next fifty years. There he married a well-known still-life and portrait painter, Maria Richards Oakey (1845-1927) - a union that immediately gave him access to Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909), the editor of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, whose wife, Helena de Kay Gilder, had earlier shared a studio with Oakey. Through them Dewing met the influential critics of the day, including Clarence Cook and Charles de Kay, the artist John La Farge, the poet Emma Lazarus, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He also became a close friend of the architect Stanford White, who helped him sell his first tonalist painting, The Days [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED], a work unquestionably influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic movements.

By the late 1880s Dewing had begun to paint women in sparsely furnished interiors [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED] or in freely painted landscapes inspired by the surroundings of Cornish, New Hampshire, where he summered with other artist friends. Among these landscapes is In the Garden [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED], which his New York patron John Gellatly (1853-1931) particularly admired because it recalled masterpieces from the past, notably those of the fifteenth-century Italian artist Botticelli. In this manner Dewing joined other American artists of his generation in an artistic movement known as the American renaissance. His evident desire to be considered part of the great tradition of Western painting may also have been the impetus for his forays into silverpoint, a medium popular in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(4) Dewing's taste for the old masters continued into the twentieth century, when his attention shifted to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose art was then experiencing a general revival [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED].

By 1890 Dewing had met his greatest patron, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) of Detroit, and with his financial assistance he took his wife and daughter, Elizabeth, abroad in October 1894. They lived in London, where Dewing worked periodically with James McNeill Whistler, whose influence is evident in the palette of Harmony in Rose and Gray [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. Having determined to paint what Dewing called a woman's "soul atmosphere," as one critic reported,(5) Dewing suggested the high-strung vitality of the model by surrounding her with a palpitating aura of expressive brushwork. The unadorned background includes vivid passages of ocher-orange, a color that appears not only in certain Whistler portraits, but is also prevalent in the works of Edgar Degas.

Dewing moved to Paris in April 1895, disgruntled because the English art establishment had failed to welcome him. For a few months he divided his time between Paris and Giverny, and while he admired the "pretty" surroundings of Giverny, he longed for the summer art colony in Cornish.(6)

He returned to America in July 1895 and went immediately to Cornish. There, the following year, he began working on The Four Sylvan Sounds [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED] the first of a series of decorative screens he produced for Freer and his business associates. The Four Sylvan Sounds and later easel paintings such as The White Birch [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VIII OMITTED] expand on the theme of visual and mental oppositions found in earlier paintings such as The Song [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED], where the viewer is ushered into a nebulous, sometimes disturbing, dreamscape that records the minds response to nature, rather than the eyes. This phase of Dewing's art displays his affinity with the European symbolists and confirms his increasing aesthetic distance from his American contemporaries. Dewing called these large landscapes with figures "decorations," and he felt they failed to command the attention they deserved, as he wrote to Freer.(7) He told the collector that this segment of his art was only for a "few choice spirits" whose superior sensibilities enabled them to understand these refined, poetic paintings. Prominent among such connoisseurs were Freer himself, who acquired forty-six of Dewing's works, and Gellatly, who bought thirty-one. Their unremitting support was a bulwark to his career.