A Gilded Age artist who specialized in figures and portraits, Thomas Wilmer Dewing is best known for his atmospheric portrayals of genteel young women depicted in hazy outdoor settings or isolated in quiet, sparsely furnished interiors. The artist’s painterly handling, his use of a muted palette, and his enduring emphasis on conveying mood and states of mind link him with Aestheticism and the tonalist tradition in American art. At the same time, Dewing’s creative idiosyncrasies—his penchant for reductive, near-abstract designs, lush paint surfaces, and slender, swan-necked models—set him apart from his contemporaries. Indeed, Dewing was an individualist who imbued his images with a sense of enigma and an evocative dream-like quality that found favor with such discerning collectors as Charles Lang Freer and John Gellatly.
Dewing spent most of his career in New York, but he was a Bostonian born and bred. The youngest son of Paul and Sophronia Durant Dewing, he grew up in a modest household that nurtured his early interest in drawing, music, and natural history. At the age of fourteen, following the death of his father (a millwright who succumbed to alcoholism), Dewing was apprenticed to a lithographer, after which he honed his skills as a draftsman by working for Dominique C. Fabronius, a Belgian lithographer active in Boston during the 1860s. By 1868, he was living in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he made his living as a taxidermist until about 1872, when he returned to Boston to embark on a career as an artist. In 1875, Dewing was among a group of local painters who organized life classes at the Lowell Institute, honing his skills there until relocating to Albany, New York, where he undertook the portrait work that provided him with the funds to travel abroad.
Seeking to broaden his expertise in anatomical drawing and modeling, Dewing attended classes at the Académie Julian in Paris from July 1876 to October 1877, receiving instruction from Gustave-Rudolphe Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Upon returning to the United States, he began teaching at newly established the Boston Museum School while exhibiting his work at local venues, notably the Boston Art Club and Doll and Richards, as well as at the Society of American Artists and the National Academy in Design in New York. Feeling that opportunities for patronage in Boston were limited, Dewing settled in Manhattan in the autumn of 1880. Shortly thereafter, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League of New York, where, until 1888, he taught the Antique Class in the morning and the Composition Class in the afternoon.
Following his marriage to the noted genre and floral still-life painter Maria Richards Oakey (1845–1927) in 1881, Dewing joined the coterie of artists, writers, and collectors who fraternized with the writer and editor Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, Helena De Kay Gilder, both leading proponents of the American Aesthetic Movement. Through this fortuitous connection, Dewing befriended the renowned architect Stanford White who, in addition to designing many of the artist’s gilded frames, commissioned him to paint works for his own collection as well as for his clients. During these years, Dewing explored aspects of academic realism and English Pre-Raphaelitism and familiarized himself with the decorative concerns of Aestheticism and the Japanese print tradition, as well as with the work of James McNeill Whistler and Jan Vermeer. His allegorical figure subjects from this period attracted attention for their refined draftsmanship, smooth surfaces, and high level of craftsmanship––the legacy of the artist’s earlier training in Paris.
By the end of the 1880s, Dewing had come into his own as an artist with a distinctive point of view. Turning his attention to depictions of tall, graceful women in indoor and outdoor environments, he conceived an innovative notion of ideal female beauty that set him apart from his counterparts. To be sure, desirous of conveying states of mind rather than descriptive anecdote, Dewing focused his attention on visionary depictions of thin, fine-boned models in long gowns frolicking in Edenic landscape settings or posed singly in hushed interiors, favoring graceful, intelligent types rather than conventionally pretty women. Dewing’s work soon attracted the attention of some of the most well-heeled collectors of his day, notably the Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer, the Asian art enthusiast who acquired the largest number of examples of his work (housed today at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) and arranged purchases by business acquaintances ranging from the Connecticut manufacturing druggist James Baker Williams to Francis M. Thomas, president of the Erie Railroad. Gellatly, based in New York, was also an avid patron, purchasing such key examples as The Hermit Thrush (circa 1890; Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.). While the sun-dappled and brightly optimistic paintings of the impressionists dominated the art market, Dewing’s more introspective tonalist images occupied a niche of their own. In his opinion, discerning millionaires such as Freer and Gellatly were among the few connoisseurs who, along with Cortissoz, understood the underlying emotional component that pervaded his work.
In addition to his activity in New York, Dewing enjoyed a lengthy affiliation (1885–1905) with the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he associated with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the painter Abbott Thayer, who shared his interest in Aestheticism. In 1894, Dewing traveled to England, where he painted alongside Whistler in Walter Sickert’s studio at 13 Roberts Street. Moving on to France in April 1895, Dewing divided his time between Paris and the Anglo-American art colony in Giverny.
Dewing returned to New York in the summer of 1895. Two years later––dissatisfied with the restrictive exhibition policies of the Society of American Artists––Dewing resigned from that organization and joined The Ten (also known as Ten American Painters), an informal group comprising primarily of established impressionists from New York and Boston who banded together to exhibit their work annually. For the next two decades The Ten, which included Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, and Bostonians Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank Benson, enjoyed the freedom to exhibit what they wanted, when they wanted. Dewing’s paintings clearly stood out from those of his cohorts.
