American prints in the arts and crafts tradition

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1996 by Lindsay Leard

In addition to placing Dow's woodcuts within the print making revival and Japonisme movement, both widespread at the end of the nineteenth century, Fenollosa noted the influence of the arts and crafts movement in Dow's reliance on decorative design, truth to materials, and handcraftsmanship. By changing colors, papers, and textures, the artist could create a wide variety of prints from a single set of blocks, making each print a unique work of art. Dow approached print making as a designer, arranging broadly defined shapes and decorative, rather than natural, colors on a two-dimensional surface. He created depth by overlapping shapes and placing the more distant ones higher on the horizon. His subjects were clearly inspired by views of New England, but he abstracted and stylized them to combine the pictorial and the decorative.

Two years after the show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Dow's woodcuts were included in the First Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts held at Copley Hall in Boston.(4) The organizers believed that an exhibition of American handicrafts would elevate public taste and lessen the demand for poor quality machine-made products. Among the organizers were Charles Eliot Norton, a professor of fine arts at Harvard University, an art critic, and an advocate of John Ruskin's teachings; and Denman Waldo Ross and William Sturgis Bigelow, both trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition comprised the work of more than one thousand designers of furniture, ceramics, textiles, and works in leather. The objects were functional in design and their decoration was often composed of stylized motifs from nature. Dow exhibited in the category "Illustrations and Decorative Designs,"(5) and in keeping with the philosophy of the arts and crafts movement he employed the most straightforward printing process in which silhouetted shapes reveal the simplicity of the technique.

In 1899 Dow published a design manual for art students that challenged the tradition of art imitating nature. Entitled Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education, it was featured in the second exhibition of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts held in April of that year.(6) Dow believed that art should not be created by coping but by harmoniously combining line, color, and mass. He applied these principles to his wood-block prints and to all the decorative arts.

Dow's commitment to unifying crafts and fine art and making them part of everyday life was realized in 1900 when he founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art. By 1903 an article in Handicraft, the monthly publication of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, stated that the school represented "one of the most notable phases of the arts-and-crafts movement."(7) The article said that Dow taught that decoration was abstracted from "common things found at hand," and cited a rug ornamented with a willow tree so stylized as to be unrecognizable, "though the resemblance is clear enough when the name of the beautiful and curiously original pattern is given."(8)

The Handicraft article described Dow's series entitled Ipswich Prints as "an extension of handicraft"(9) in which the artist used a small printing press, and the author suggested the possibility of creating an "Ipswich Press,"(10) no doubt recalling William Morris's Kelmscott Press and Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft Press. Dow completed the Ipswich Prints in 1902 and wrote in the introduction to the portfolio that he was "painting" with the press and the inks.(11) The series of prints illustrates the artist's color theories and includes examples of original compositions as well as reproductions of textile designs (see Pls. III, IV). For Dow, the set was both a teaching tool and a means of combining printing with design.

In the year of the Handicraft article Dow was made a "Craftsman" member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, a designation for "designers, as well as those practicing some branch of applied decorative art."(12) In 1904 he became a "Master," a title conferred on those who contributed "a standard of excellence" to the society's exhibitions.(13) Dow maintained his membership until his death in 1922.

In addition to the Ipswich summer school, Dow taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from 1895 to 1903 and then in the department of fine arts at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City, from 1904 until his death. In all his teaching he upheld the arts and crafts movement's goal of democratizing art, writing at the time of World War I

In the new age after the war art will not be separated from industry as it is now. It will not be something for the few who can afford it, but will be the heritage of all. Art came from the people originally and will return to them in the form of craftsmanship. If we are to have good craftsmen who can give us finished products of permanent value, we must provide adequate art training.(14)

A number of Dow's students became accomplished in the art of the wood-block print. Many of them were decorative artists as well as print makers, and most of them were women. Like needlepoint and hooked rugs, wood-block prints could be made at home with very few tools. Following Dow's example, his students' designs could be rendered in more than one medium.