Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Biography.

Also Known as: Thomas W. Dewing, T. W. Dewing, Thomas Dewing

Born:

Boston, Massachusetts 1851

Died:

New York, New York 1938

Biography

Born in Boston, studied in Paris, settled in New York City. A sensitive figure painter and accomplished draftsman who specialized in ethereal pictures of women; he virtually ceased painting after 1920.

Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)

The timeless nature of Dewing's landscapes stands in sharp contrast to the ever-increasing pace of modern life in New England. Verdant, mysterious, and peopled with attractive, classically dressed women, Dewing's paintings provided fixed points of truth and beauty for a turn-of-the-century generation fearing the great changes in American culture wrought by immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. Dewing's father worked in a paper mill, suffered financial ruin, and died an alcoholic, yet he descended from one of the first families of seventeenth-century New England. Despite modest circumstances, Dewing studied at the Lowell Institute in the native Boston and traveled to Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1876. Returning to Boston, he taught at the newly opened Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts before moving, like so many writers and artists of his generation, to New York City. Living in New York, Dewing sought refuge from the vicissitudes of his new environment by returning annually, from 1885 to 1905, to the artists's colony at Cornish, New Hampshire. In Cornish, he perfected the misty, dream-like aesthetic that he used to depict a beautiful past.

William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory(Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999)

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, a native of Boston, studied successively in Paris and Munich from 1876 to 1879. On his return to America he joined the newly organized Society of American Painters and promptly immersed himself in New York's cultural scene, which was centered in the salon of Richard Watson Gilder. Gilder was editor of The Century magazine and aesthetic arbiter to a circle of prominent artists, writers, musicians and millionaires—tastemakers to the Gilded Age. At Gilder's, Dewing met a highly congenial bon vivant in the person of architect Stanford White, who became his cohort about town and resident frame maker. "Tommy" and "Stanny" were inseparable until White's tragic death in 1905.
It was also at Gilder's salon that Dewing met the talented artist Maria Oakey (1845–1927), who would become his wife and a significant influence on his work. Miss Oakey, who had studied with John La Farge, encouraged Dewing to move from his hard-edged figurative style toward the softer, tonalist expression that characterized his work thereafter.
From 1890, Dewing concentrated his efforts on idealized depictions of elegant, attenuated young women, singly or in small groups, idling in fresh green fields. Most of these "decorations," as he called them, were painted during the Dewings' residence in Cornish, New Hampshire. There during the summer holidays they enjoyed the lively company of White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, George de Forest Brush, the young Maxfield Parrish, and other urban expatriates.
It was also during this period that Ms. Oakey-Dewing shifted her attention from figurative studies to flower arrangements—close-up, soft-focus views, cropped to suggest continuation into exterior space. On at least one occasion, she contributed the floral elements to a major work of her husband. In 1897, Dewing joined the Ten American Painters, defectors from the Society of American Painters who now sought more advantageous conditions for the exhibition of their work. For twenty years this group annually exhibited their work. From about 1905, Dewing shifted his attention from exterior to interior settings for his work. The interiors are softly painted, tonally uniform, generalized and ambiguous; the figures are presented alone or in pairs, prominently placed in shallow space. But, however close-up, they remain essentially the same elegant, detached creatures, elusive, idealized, and contemplative. As one critic observed, "the Dewing type was intellectual enough to be worthy of Boston; aristocratic enough to be worthy of Philadelphia; well enough dressed to be a New Yorker, but seldom pretty enough to evoke the thought of Baltimore"—but always genteel enough to insulate the viewer from disturbing thoughts of the tumultuous changes that were taking place in the real world of commerce and industry.
Dewing was singularly fortunate in having a pair of wealthy patrons who were devoted to his work. The New York insurance magnate John Gellatly was convinced that Dewing was "the greatest living painter" and consequently acquired thirty-one of his works, most of which were bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institution. The Detroit businessman and railroad-car manufacturer Charles Lang Freer was sufficiently enamoured of Dewing's "decorations" to have purchased twenty-seven of them for incorporation in his eponymous gallery of art in Washington, D.C. Though their subject matter no longer fulfills its original inspirational intent, the rich painterly skills of the artist continue to delight the eye and mind.

“. . . true art . . . [which is] imaginative art . . . is the domain of poetry and painting.” Thomas Wilmer Dewing, quoted in Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured: The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1996

Thomas Wilmer Dewing studied for a time in Paris, then returned home and taught at the newly opened art school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But he was ambitious and knew that he needed to live in New York to establish himself as a leading artist. He moved in 1880 and on Christmas Day of that year proposed to artist Maria Oakey. The young couple embraced New York’s cultural scene, joining a circle of rising artists, actors, musicians, and writers. For more than fifteen years, Thomas and Maria led the artists’ colony at Cornish, New Hampshire, pursuing a “higher life” through art, music, and literature. Dewing and his friends believed that the role of art was to “suggest emotions or recall . . . memories of past experiences, of love, poetic thought . . .” (Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured, 1996). Dewing continued to paint into the early years of the twentieth century with the support of railroad-car manufacturer Charles Lang Freer and insurance magnate John Gellatly, both of whom gave their extensive collections to the Smithsonian Institution.