Figural
THOMAS WILMER DEWING (1851–1938)
May (Springtime, Welcome Sweet Springtime), before 1921
Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.
Signed (at lower right): T W Dewing
RECORDED: Lifetime photograph, Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Dewing family papers, 1876–1963 // The Milch Gallery Art Notes (February 1921), pp. 5–6, p. 8 illus. // “American Works of Art,” Kennedy Quarterly 9 (October 1969), p. 123 no. 101 illus. in color, as “Springtime” // Christina Miller Cocroft, “Thomas Wilmer Dewing: The Man and His Art,” M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1971, no. 57 // “The Turn of the Century,” Kennedy Quarterly 15 (September 1977), p. 201 no. 149, illus. as “Welcome, Sweet Springtime” // Sarah Lea Burns, “The Poetic Mode in American Painting: George Fuller and Thomas Dewing,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1979 p. 230, illus. p. 421// Susan A. Hobbs, Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty into Art: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1: Oils (Alexandria, Virginia: The Thomas Wilmer Dewing Catalogue Raisonné, 2018), pp. 322 no. 144, 323 illus. in color
EXHIBITED: Milch Galleries, New York, January 10–29, 1921, Exhibition of Paintings, no. 12, as “May” // Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 28–June 30, 1921, Twentieth Annual Exhibition of Paintings, no. 84 // Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 23–March 9, 1930, An Exhibition of Paintings from the Private Collection of W. S. Stimmel, no. 14 // Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York, November 18–March 10, 2024, Our Gilded Age
EX COLL.: W. Stimmel, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by 1930; [Victor Spark & Co., New York, by 1965]; Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Horowitz, New York, by 1965; [Kennedy Galleries, New York, by 1969]; to private collection, 1978 until the present
Dewing once proclaimed that “the purpose of the artist [is] to see beautifully,” a notion that recalls such quintessential works as May, which features a pair of ethereal, fine-boned maidens in a lush patch of meadowland similar to the type of pastoral setting he would have encountered in and around Cornish. To be sure, Dewing's artfully posed ladies exist in their own private world, the carefree figure on the right performing a dance in celebration of spring while her talented companion (in keeping with Dewing’s love of music) plays a cello. Their expressive, softly rendered forms blend easily into the decorative and equally suggestive background of lawn and trees, evoking, as Dewing himself described such works, a “poetic and imaginative world where a few choice spirits live.”
Following its inclusion in an exhibition held at the Milch Galleries in New York in January 1921, May was sent to the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh a few months later. Admirers of the work included William S. Stimmel (1864–1935), an affluent broker for the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in Pittsburgh, who acquired it for his collection. May graced the walls of the Carnegie Institute again during the early months of 1930, when forty-six works from Stimmel’s impressive collection, which included examples by impressionists such as the Hassam and Twachtman, was put on display for local art audiences.
