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Thomas Wilmer Dewing

American, 1851 - 1938

Death-PlaceNew York, NY

Birth-PlaceBoston, MA

BiographyThomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938)

Born in Boston, Thomas Dewing was the youngest child of Paul Dewing, a millwright, and his wife, Sophronia Durant Dewing. His father died when Thomas was twelve, leaving the family in straitened financial circumstances. The future artist was then apprenticed in a lithography shop. As a young man he became known for meticulous black-and-white chalk portraits. Dewing attended the Académie Julian in Paris in 1876-77, working under the direction of Gustave-Rudolphe Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. After returning to Boston, Dewing taught at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1880, upon being elected to the Society of American Artists, he moved to New York City, where he lived for the next fifty years. In 1881 Dewing married the still-life and figure painter Maria Richards Oakey. During the 1880s he became known for works inspired by English Aestheticism. Dewing’s best known painting in this vein is “The Days” (1896; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), which won the Clarke Prize in 1887 thereby guaranteeing his election to the National Academy of Design (1888). The architect Stanford White soon provided Dewing with society portrait commissions and designed frames for his pictures as well. When Dewing’s “Lady in Yellow” (1888; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) won a silver medal at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, the artist’s professional reputation was assured. “The Piano” (1891; Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) captured a gold medal at the Munich International Exposition three years later. From 1885 to 1905 Dewing and his wife regularly spent summers at the artists’ colony at Cornish, New Hampshire, a setting that inspired his landscape decorations. Detroit railroad-car manufacturer Charles Lang Freer and New York businessman John Gellatly became Dewing’s most important patrons. Following a sojourn in London and Paris in 1894-95, the artist joined with other like minded painters in 1897 to form an association called the Ten American Painters. By the turn of the century Dewing had for the most part abandoned his outdoor pictures for interior scenes painted from models in the studio, finding inspiration in the example of seventeenth-century Dutch artists Jan Vermeer and Gerard Ter Borch. In these works Dewing explored his sitters’ psychological states through subtle disjunctions in pose and gesture. He also became noted for the beautifully painted surfaces of his canvases. Dewing was an accomplished pastelist and completed a dozen or so exquisite and masterful silverpoints.

”Woman in Purple and Green (Portrait of a Lady)”, 1905
Oil on panel, 20 x 15 3/4 in. (50.8 x 40 cm)
Signed (lower left): “T W Dewing / 1905”
Charles F. Smith Fund (1948.2)

The sitter in “Woman in Purple and Green” was the prominent New York artist’s model Alma Allen, who appears in other Dewing paintings wearing the same gown seen here (Portrait of a Girl, 1905, and “La Comedienne”, 1906, both Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Her unique garment consists of a green velvet skirt with a purple waist and a split bodice, a rolled collar, and long sleeves of medieval design. Another studio prop that appears in these paintings is an equally distinctive curule chair with lion-headed finials and green velvet upholstery. The chair, similar to one in works by Jan Vermeer, as well as the historic quality of the costume lends “Woman in Purple and Green” an antiquarian flavor that links it to the Old Master paintings Dewing emulated at the turn of the century. His admiration for such precedents is also evident in his painting technique. The finely modeled face of the sitter is composed of tiny, featherlike hatching strokes similar to those found in egg tempera paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

The painting is, however, undeniably “fin de siècle” in its subtle psychological disjunctions. The model’s bodice is provocatively low, giving her a deshabille seemingly at odds with her aristocratic, shadowed visage. This deep décolletage reveals smooth, sensuously rounded shoulders that seem strangely opposed to her distant, aloof bearing. Her body language, furthermore, reveals a modicum of anxiety, for she sits erect, arms drawn in tightly, hands clasped, and knees locked together. Such contradictions provide the enigma that Dewing sought in his works, for, as he himself once said, a painting should be “just sour enough to save it.”1) The sitter’s surface calm contrasts with her underlying tension, thereby opening the painting to various interpretations and lending it a fascination that it would otherwise not possess. Dewing widely exhibited “Woman in Purple and Green” after its completion. At the first Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy held in 1906, for example, the painting was showcased on the west wall and described as “a beautiful picture . . . the quintessence of subtlety in expression and harmony in coloring.” (2)

SAH

Bibliography:
Royal Cortissoz, “Some Imaginative Types in American Art,” Harper’s Magazine 91 (July 1895): 164-179; Ezra Tharp, “T.W. Dewing,” Art and Progress 5 (March 1914): 155-161; Kathleen Pyne, “Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Susan Hobbs, “The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured”, exhib. cat. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1996).

Notes:

1. “First Exhibition,” “Academy Notes” 2 (June 1906): 3. See also Royal Cortissoz, “Art Exhibitions,” “New-York Daily Tribune”, January 5, 1906, “Fine Arts,” “Brooklyn Daily Eagle”, January 6, 1906, “Picture Exhibit in Lotos Club,” “New York Times”, April 1906,

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