Slideshow: Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1891
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 50.8 x 67.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.66

Originally titled The Musician, this painting is the first of several works by Dewing that suggest a connection among music, reverie, and aesthetic attention. It depicts the model Minnie Clark seated before a piano in an otherwise empty room. Her brunette hair, black dress, and massive dark piano contrast sharply with the opalescent green of the interior. Thinly painted areas in various tones of green balance the visual weight of the piano and the female figure on the right. The skewed perspective is tilted in the manner of the Japanese prints that Dewing admired and collected. As a result, the illusionistic rendering of space is attenuated, reduced to a flickering violet shadow at the right and a few saturated strokes of greenish blue pigment at the lower left. Both of these passages suggest where the floor and wall meet, but they also function as chromatically significant surface details. Such emphasis on a decorative rendering of space recalls the atmospheric style of James McNeill Whistler, to whom Dewing’s paintings and pastels were often compared by contemporary critics and collectors.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1892
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 50.8 x 40.2 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.67

Dewing was especially proud of this “studio picture,” as he called it, asserting that it had “floated on a sea of prosperity from the first.” Freer purchased it directly from the artist before it was completed, and he allowed it to be exhibited widely and often. Although the theatrical pose of the model resembles a commercial fashion plate, its display in New York in 1892 prompted a critic to praise the painting as a “study in color tone” and a “decorative” treatment of the figure. Eventually the painting arrived at Freer’s house in Detroit, where, according to Dewing, it had “reached a resting place beyond the fortunes of but few works of art. It was born on a lucky day.” Part of its good fortune was its being displayed in Freer’s parlor, where it hung adjacent to several other works by Dewing.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1892
Oil on canvas
H x W: 107 x 137.4 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.68

Dewing regarded his “decorations”—his term for the landscapes inspired by the lush gardens and verdant meadows of Cornish, New Hampshire—as his most aesthetically refined works. Intended to adorn the homes of his wealthy patrons, these canvases originally functioned as elements in a larger, aesthetically orchestrated decorative ensemble. This painting, for instance, along with its companion Before Sunrise, hung in Freer’s small parlor that Dewing had helped decorate. Together the works functioned as a thematically and formally linked pair, their veils of silvery green paint specially toned to harmonize with the woodwork, wall color, and furnishings of the room.

In most areas of After Sunset, the paint is thinly applied. On the lower right, it is smoothed with a palette knife; other areas are so thin that the pigment merely stains the coarse weave of the canvas, allowing the rough texture to be a significant feature in the decorative quality of the work. This emphasis on subtle surface textures indicates Dewing was as interested in these abstract, formal qualities as he was in the ambiguous narrative suggested by the elegant women pausing in the moonlit glade.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1894–95
Oil on canvas
H x W: 106.8 x 137.6 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.22

Freer added Before Sunrise to his parlor several years after he purchased its companion piece, After Sunset. Both works are freely painted on a coarsely woven canvas, with fashionably dressed women drifting through a misty twilight. Dewing was already at work on this painting when he received a package from Freer containing a set of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806). To Dewing, the elegant figures in the ukiyo-e prints appeared to be Japanese counterparts of the American women who wandered through the dreamlike world of his “decorations.” He briefly considered calling it Dedicated to Utamaro, and Dewing later asked Freer to hang Japanese prints in the parlor, where viewers could easily compare the images with his own paintings.

 

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, ca. 1894
Pastel on brown paper
H x W: 17.6 x 26.4 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.20

In December 1893, Freer sent Dewing a large quantity of brown paper similar to the kind that Whistler used for his pastel drawings. The results were rewarding: Dewing’s pastels—single figures set against undefined backgrounds—were aesthetically satisfying and highly marketable, and he continued to work in the medium off and on for the remainder of his career. Like his paintings of figures in interiors, Dewing’s pastels are composed around slight variations on conventional studio poses. The pastels, however, often convey a sense of eroticism that is only hinted at in his oil paintings. The artist’s friend and patron, the celebrated architect Stanford White (1853–1906), may have inspired Dewing to create The Pearl and several other related pastels. (White had declared his intention was to amass a collection of nudes that would shock genteel society.)

The emphasis in this drawing is certainly on the model’s elongated body; her face, though turned toward the viewer, is blurry and almost featureless. The asymmetrical composition, with the tilted foreground, recalls the structural organization of Japanese prints and the work of Whistler, whose pastels had been featured in an exhibition at the Wunderlich Gallery in New York City in 1889. While Whistler’s pastels tend to be extremely spare, with dark lines and brilliant patches of color, Dewing built up an opaque surface and a carefully modeled figure, in the process creating a delicate tension between optical and tactile values. The model’s lovely form is fully available to our gaze, but her elevated placement on the paper seems to place her slightly out of reach.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1896–97
Oil on wood panels
H x W: 175.7 x 153 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.72

During the two years that Dewing worked on the pair of screens called The Four Sylvan Sounds, Charles Lang Freer acquired sixteen screens by Japanese artists. Dewing’s familiarity with those works from Asia is apparent in the way his bifold screens “read” from right to left, just as the storyline does in Freer’s Japanese screens. In explaining his interpretation of the music of nature, Dewing began with the figure who rests a flute on her knee. She represents the lilting song of the hermit thrush. The woman to the left plays the xylophone to imitate the sound of water in a stream. On the next screen, the female figure holds a drum to repeat the staccato rhythm of a woodpecker in a tree. To the far left, the figure balances a lyre whose music sounds like wind through pine trees. By focusing on these “four forest notes,” Dewing creatively translated the sensory pleasures of a ramble through the woods into the visual language of painting.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1896–97
Oil on wood panels
H x W: 175.7 x 153 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.73

Writing to Freer from his summer studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1894, Thomas Dewing observed, “I wish you could be here, taking in this cool fresh air filled with bird notes & scents of flowers.” Two years later the artist translated the sensory pleasures of a ramble through the woods into the visual language of painting, noting that he had begun to paint a pair of screens representing “the four forest notes—the Hermit Thrush, the sound of running water, the woodpecker, and the wind through the pine trees.” The allusion to the music of nature gives this pair of screens a multisensory quality and evokes philosopher William James’s idea that “seen things and heard things cohere with each other.” Inspiration for the screens came from a variety of sources. The figures are derived from ancient Greek Tanagra figurines, and the theme of woodland notes is from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The idea of a bifold screen may have come from the artist’s visit to Whistler’s studio in Paris in 1895, where Dewing saw a Japanese screen painted with a Nocturne, Whistler’s term for his moonlit river views. In addition, Dewing knew Japanese formats appealed to Charles Lang Freer. (He often acquired works on Freer’s behalf at Yamanaka and Company, a New York dealer in Asian art.) During the two years that Dewing worked on The Four Sylvan Sounds, Freer purchased sixteen Japanese screens. The influence of seeing those works, with which Dewing would have been familiar, is apparent in the way the screen “reads” from right to left. When Dewing described the work to Freer, he began with the figure holding the flute, who represents the hermit thrush. Additionally, some of the forest leaves and flowers are painted with a stencil. These elegant, stylized patterns recall several screens in Freer’s Japanese collection.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1904–1905
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 60.8 x 45 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1905.2

The long-necked antique lute that the “girl” of the title plucks was a present from Dewing’s friend and colleague Stanford White, the renowned architect. It is one of several musical instruments that appear over and over in Dewing’s work from this period, and its inclusion in this painting suggests a connection between visual and auditory pleasure. Contemporary critics and later scholars noted parallels between Dewing and the French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), in whose paintings women often hold musical instruments much like the one seen here. A similarly languid atmosphere of aesthetic absorption is often evident in Watteau’s works.

Charles Lang Freer first saw this painting on a visit to the artist’s New York City studio in January 1905, and he promptly declared it “one of [Dewing’s] very greatest.” Eager to share the painting with a broader public, he and Dewing worked together in December 1907 to produce good photographs, in anticipation of images of Girl with Lute being published in several periodicals, including Harper’s Monthly and the Literary Digest.

Thomas Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
United States, 1907
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 50.8 x 40 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.168

In 1907, the same year Dewing completed The Mirror, Freer sent the artist a newly published study on Johannes Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch artist whose paintings clearly influenced Dewing’s approach to depicting interior spaces. Much like the Dutch master, whose works reveal Vermeer’s painstaking deliberation in their composition, Dewing carefully arranged the objects in relation to one another in The Mirror. The model is shown with her back to the viewer: the curve of her shoulder creates a visual rhyme with the curving profile of the vase. Indeed, The Mirror contains a number of these deliberately artificial analogies and parallels: the long stems of the flowers echo the model’s graceful neck; the blossom turning toward the light repeats her turn toward the mirror. With its framed reflection, the mirror itself asserts Dewing’s interest in a self-referential pictorial language and his belief in “art for art’s sake.”

Thomas Dewing (American, 18511938)
United States, ca. 1916
Oil on canvas
H x W: 63.7 x 48.4 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.360

The Garland, which takes its title from the tiny floral wreath in the woman’s hand, was one of the last works by Dewing to enter Freer’s collection. The model’s pose recalls Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, and like that work, this pared-down composition is executed in a narrow tonal range. Its chromatic modulations and sparse arrangement make this a particularly apt illustration of the attention to surface beauty that so appealed to Charles Lang Freer. The model gazes downward at an open book and toward a Japanese ceramic bowl. This directs attention to the room’s overall composition and even to the surface of the canvas itself, which offers a variety of textures, from the long thin strokes of the woman’s gown, the smooth surface resulting from the use of a palette knife on the floor and parts of the background, and the delicate stippling that abstracts and generalizes her features. The elegant figure is Gertrude McNeill, a noted model. A year after posing for this painting, she left New York City for Hollywood, where she enjoyed a successful career as a silent film star.