American, 1851 - 1938
Thomas Dewing received his early schooling at home from an older sister. As a teenager in Boston, he was apprenticed to the lithographic firm of Dominique Fabronius and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1874, he had established himself as an artist, taking space in the Boston Studio Building, where he perhaps gained his mastery of anatomical draftsmanship from lectures given there by the artist-physician William Rimmer during 1874-75. Intent on traveling to Europe, Dewing spent time in Albany, New York, drawing charcoal portraits in order to finance the trip. He arrived in Paris in 1876, enrolling at the Académie Julian under Gustav Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. The following year, he taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and exhibited academic nude studies both at the museum and at the Boston Art Club.
In 1880 Dewing moved to New York, where he was elected to the Society of American Artists, an organization in which his future wife, the still-life painter Maria Oakey, played an active part. Their marriage in 1881 placed Dewing among the artistic and literary elite of the city's art world, as the artist Helena de Kay and her husband, Richard Watson Gilder (the managing editor of Scribner's Magazine), were among Maria's closest friends. The Gilder home on East Fifteenth Street was a veritable salon for leading intellectuals and artists of the day, including the painters John La Farge, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Abbott Thayer, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the art critics Clarence Cook and Charles de Kay.
Dewing began teaching at the Art Students League in 1881, remaining on the staff until 1888. In 1883 he and his wife traveled to Europe in order to gather original drawings and fine-art reproductions for the league. In London they visited the studio of the English aesthetic painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones, whose large decorative friezes depicting ethereally beautiful women set a precedent for Dewing's early figural paintings.
It was during this time that Dewing began an enduring friendship and artistic association with the preeminent architect Stanford White. White would procure painting commissions for the artist and design elaborate American renaissance frames for specific works.
In 1885 Dewing spent his first summer at the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, and two years later purchased a home there. The garden and lush surrounding hills would provide landscape settings for many of his subsequent works. Except for a trip abroad in 1894-95, when he visited London and Paris, New York and Cornish would be his principal places of residence.
Dewing's career advanced significantly in 1887, when he received the Thomas B. Clarke Prize for The Days (1886, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.), his entry in the Academy's annual exhibition, leading to his election as Academician the following year. This monumental decorative canvas, with its friezelike arrangement of ethereal, classically draped women in a landscape setting, derives its subject and meticulously detailed style from English Pre-Raphaelite sources. By about 1890, Dewing had evolved a more personal expression, shifting his focus to compositions of languid, elegantly dressed women in ambiguous, misty, verdant landscapes. Before the turn of the century, he shifted from these "decorations" to paintings of spare interior spaces, usually occupied by a slender woman in a state of self-absorbed inactivity; in this period he also worked in pastel and silverpoint.
With Abbott Thayer, Dwight Tryon, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Dewing benefited from the sustained patronage of Charles Lang Freer of Detroit, whose collection formed the basis of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., established in 1906. The New Yorker John Gellaty was another a frequent purchaser of his paintings. Dewing last contributed work to an Academy annual in 1896; he was one of the Ten American Painters, an exhibition group formed in 1897, and regularly participated in their annual shows. His work changed little in the twentieth century, and he stopped painting well before his death, spending much of his time at his residence in White Plains, New York.
In 1880 Dewing moved to New York, where he was elected to the Society of American Artists, an organization in which his future wife, the still-life painter Maria Oakey, played an active part. Their marriage in 1881 placed Dewing among the artistic and literary elite of the city's art world, as the artist Helena de Kay and her husband, Richard Watson Gilder (the managing editor of Scribner's Magazine), were among Maria's closest friends. The Gilder home on East Fifteenth Street was a veritable salon for leading intellectuals and artists of the day, including the painters John La Farge, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Abbott Thayer, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the art critics Clarence Cook and Charles de Kay.
Dewing began teaching at the Art Students League in 1881, remaining on the staff until 1888. In 1883 he and his wife traveled to Europe in order to gather original drawings and fine-art reproductions for the league. In London they visited the studio of the English aesthetic painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones, whose large decorative friezes depicting ethereally beautiful women set a precedent for Dewing's early figural paintings.
It was during this time that Dewing began an enduring friendship and artistic association with the preeminent architect Stanford White. White would procure painting commissions for the artist and design elaborate American renaissance frames for specific works.
In 1885 Dewing spent his first summer at the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, and two years later purchased a home there. The garden and lush surrounding hills would provide landscape settings for many of his subsequent works. Except for a trip abroad in 1894-95, when he visited London and Paris, New York and Cornish would be his principal places of residence.
Dewing's career advanced significantly in 1887, when he received the Thomas B. Clarke Prize for The Days (1886, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.), his entry in the Academy's annual exhibition, leading to his election as Academician the following year. This monumental decorative canvas, with its friezelike arrangement of ethereal, classically draped women in a landscape setting, derives its subject and meticulously detailed style from English Pre-Raphaelite sources. By about 1890, Dewing had evolved a more personal expression, shifting his focus to compositions of languid, elegantly dressed women in ambiguous, misty, verdant landscapes. Before the turn of the century, he shifted from these "decorations" to paintings of spare interior spaces, usually occupied by a slender woman in a state of self-absorbed inactivity; in this period he also worked in pastel and silverpoint.
With Abbott Thayer, Dwight Tryon, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Dewing benefited from the sustained patronage of Charles Lang Freer of Detroit, whose collection formed the basis of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., established in 1906. The New Yorker John Gellaty was another a frequent purchaser of his paintings. Dewing last contributed work to an Academy annual in 1896; he was one of the Ten American Painters, an exhibition group formed in 1897, and regularly participated in their annual shows. His work changed little in the twentieth century, and he stopped painting well before his death, spending much of his time at his residence in White Plains, New York.
