Arthur Wesley Dow

A leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, Arthur Wesley Dow is widely regarded as a critical influence on the first generation of American modernist painters. Dow studied art in Paris, returning to his native Boston in 1889 to start a career as a commercial designer. He was introduced to Japanese art by a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Japanese woodblock prints, in particular, informed Dow’s expressionistic approach to color, line, and composition in atmospheric paintings and prints. Three color woodcuts of a dory from 1895, sold at auction for $15,000 in 2017, bear the hallmarks of Japanese woodblock masters with their flat composition and bold lines but take a New England beach as their subject. Dow was an even more influential teacher, with posts at Pratt Institute, the Art Students League of New York, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber were among his students. In 1891 he founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1977.