An innovative artist and influential art theorist and teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow was a proponent of pure design principles rather than literal naturalism as the basis for art. Dow was a native of Ipswich, Massachusetts, whose flat coastal landscape and subtly shifting light proved a powerful source of aesthetic inspiration. He studied art privately with teachers in Worcester and Boston before journeying to Paris for five years of tutelage under academic figural painters Gustave Boulanger (1824–88) and Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1912) at the Académie Julian, a popular school with American artists. Dow found his real love in landscape painting, which he pursued in the important rural artists' colonies of Pont-Aven and Concarneau in the northwestern province of Brittany, a coastal region he likened to his native Ipswich.
Settling in Boston in 1889, Dow began to paint the understated landscape of the Ipswich marshes in delicate, poetic canvases. He founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art, where he taught various crafts in addition to painting and printmaking, stressing the primacy of pure design and the value of handicraft in keeping with the ideals of the contemporary Arts and Crafts movement. As his work gained prominence, he searched for an alternative to the conventional aesthetic language of academic tradition, with its emphasis on careful modeling and photographic realism. He found it in Japanese art, from woodblock prints to ink painting, which he studied at the Boston Public Library and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with the encouragement of the latter's curator, Ernest Fenollosa, for whom Dow worked as an assistant for two years. Under this influence, Dow experimented with composition as a two-dimensional arrangement of color, line, and light-and-dark contrast, advocating his formalist approach to art-making in his important 1899 book Composition.
In 1895 Dow moved to the art capital of New York City, teaching at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the progressive Art Students League, and eventually Columbia University's Teachers College. He influenced a generation of fine and decorative artists working in a broad range of media, including photography; among his students were Georgia O'Keeffe, Max Weber, and Eliza Draper Gardiner. He also imparted his design principles to printmaker Helen Hyde, whom he met on a trip to Japan in 1903. Dow had immersed himself in color printmaking, but after 1907 he returned to painting in oils. A visit to the Grand Canyon in the American Southwest in the winter of 1911-12 inspired him to shift from relatively muted hues to a range of brilliant color that suggests a parallel to the expressive painting of the so-called postimpressionists. Dow revisited the Grand Canyon in 1919, but a fall sustained on that trip reduced his painting activity during the remaining three years of his life. Much admired by contemporaries as a teacher and practitioner at the cutting-edge of new artistic thinking, Dow has received renewed scholarly attention as a key figure in the development of American art and design in the early decades of the twentieth century.
