344

THOMAS WILMER DEWING

New York/New Hampshire, 1851-1938

"The South Wind".

Titled upper right. Signed and dated lower left "T.W. Dewing 1878". Includes the two-volume Thomas Wilmer Dewing - Beauty into Art: A Catalog Raisonne by Susan A. Hobbs, et al. (2018).
Oil on canvas, 58" x 36". Framed 63" x 41.5".

  • Provenance:
    Peter W. French, Boston, possibly purchased from the artist.
    George Dresser, East Weymouth, Massachusetts, by the 1930s, purchased from French as part of the contents of French's house.
    Descended in the Dresser family, Windsor, Connecticut.
    Private Collection, Kentucky.
  • Literature:
    For a discussion of this work, see Thomas Wilmer Dewing - Beauty into Art: A Catalog Raisonne by Susan A. Hobbs with Shoshanna Abeles (2018), p. 87-89. Illustrated in color p. 89, plate 6.

    Notes:
    Thomas Dewing is best known for artful, dream-like portraits of refined women executed in a Tonalist palette. He worked at a time when Impressionism gained dominance in the art world and was then surpassed by Modernism.

    Dewing was born in Boston to prominent land- and mill-owning families. Thomas expressed an early interest in the arts; he was fond of drawing and literature, played violin and had ambitions of becoming a stage performer. His father, however, was a drunk, and led the family into a steady financial and social decline before he died in 1863, at which time Thomas was apprenticed to a lithographer.

    In the early 1870s Dewing studied informally in Boston and became known for excellent figural chalk drawings. In 1876 he moved to Paris and studied at the Academie Julian, where he learned anatomical drawing with live models. He returned to New York, then Boston, in 1877/1878, showing small academic nudes, which gained him attention from artists R. Swain Gifford and George Fuller, who encouraged Dewing to show in New York.

    Shortly after moving to New York in 1880, Dewing met and married Maria Oakey, an accomplished painter with extensive formal training and connections within the art world. He was an instructor at the Arts Students League until 1888, and he was elected to the National Academy of Design and won a medal at the Paris Exposition in the late 1880s. Starting in 1885, he and Maria summered at the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, and in 1898, he became a member of the Ten American Painters, a group that included Childe Hassam and J. Alden Weir, though Dewing stood out from the others because he was not an Impressionist.

    Dewing is best known as a Tonalist, an American genre rooted in "art for art's sake" English Aestheticism. In her catalog raisonne, Susan Hobbs posits that the classically draped women in works by Edward Burne-Jones and the 1877 opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in London may have been the inspiration for Dewing's monumentally scaled "South Wind", an elongated floating woman plucking at the mullein plant. The concept may also have been derived from engravings after the painting "Aurora" by Jean-Louis Hamon.

    Hobbs writes that "South Wind" was likely intended as an architectural feature in a private home, and it is unique for the artist in its life-size proportions and gold leaf ground. Dewing showed the work at Doll & Richards Gallery in Boston, where critical response was positive and patrons appreciated his ability to produce something imaginative that wasn't in the French academic style.

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