Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow (born April 6, 1857, Ipswich, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 13, 1922, New York, New York) was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and educator known for his teachings based on Japanese principles of art and for his significant artistic and intellectual contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement.

Before he started any formal training, Dow made sketches of historic houses around Ipswich, Massachusetts, and, beginning in 1880, contributed illustrations to Antiquarian Papers, a monthly local newspaper. In 1881 he became an apprentice in the Boston studio of painter James M. Stone, where he met Minnie Pearson (whom he married in 1893). From there, in 1884 he went to Paris to study with Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at Académie Julian. He also took evening classes at École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs (now École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) and spent summers at Pont-Aven, the artists colony in Brittany, where he met Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard and painted landscapes en plein air (“in the open air”). While in Paris he exhibited some of his work, including Au Soir, an 1888 landscape that won honourable mention at the Universal Exposition in 1889.

Dow returned to the United States permanently in 1889. He moved to Boston and began to study prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai at the Boston Public Library. He also used the Museum of Fine Arts as a resource and met and forged a close friendship with the curator of Asian art Ernest F. Fenollosa. He took what he learned from Fenollosa and the work of Hokusai—his ukiyo-e woodcuts—and began creating woodblock prints that incorporated both Eastern and Western aesthetics. Most of his prints were landscapes of the north shore of Boston. As a devotee to the Arts and Crafts movement, he diverged from the Japanese woodblock method by executing each step of the process himself, from design to printing (whereas Japanese printmakers often completed the design and then passed on the production of the print to assistants). Later on, when Dow taught his students the art of woodblock printing—or any other art form—he encouraged them to execute all steps in the process with patience and attention to detail.

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In 1891 Dow turned much of his focus toward teaching art. He opened the Ipswich Summer School of Art in a house once owned by writer and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The school, which he ran with his wife through 1907, offered classes in photography, painting, textiles, pottery, and other media. Among the well-known artists who studied there was Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who became a good friend of the Dows. After studying closely with Fenollosa at the Museum of Fine Arts, Dow was appointed assistant curator there in 1893. Two years later (through 1904) he became a faculty member at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he taught, among others, photographer Gertrude Käsebier and painter Max Weber. He also taught at the Art Students League of New York (1897–1903).

In 1899 Dow published the first edition of his highly influential Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. That volume became a staple textbook for art education. In it he outlined his three principles of successful composition: line, notan (Japanese concept of light and shade, or mass), and colour. He also encouraged looking to nature for inspiration and for examples of good design. He was decidedly antiacademic in his teaching. Creating art, according to Dow, was not a matter of imitation or copying; it was rather a matter of personal expression realized through a harmonious composition that was founded in simple linear forms, notan, and colour.

Following a year of travel abroad, during which he visited Tokyo and Kyōto, he was appointed by Teachers College at Columbia University to teach art and serve as the director of the fine arts department (1904–22). In 1914, after she attended his summer school, the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe enrolled at Teachers College to study with Dow, who had a profound impact on her direction toward abstraction and on her approach to composition.

Dow continued to paint, draw, and work with photography and woodblock printing and taught and wrote until his death. He was a beloved teacher of international renown, which ultimately overshadowed his reputation as an artist. Given how many students he taught over several decades and that his book, Composition, had more than 20 printings over 40 years and was used in many classrooms into the 1970s, Dow’s impact on 20th-century American art was considerable. His Arts and Crafts philosophy on art and design was taught to a huge swath of four or five generations of artists. His own art work, on the other hand, gained increasing recognition after his death, including a large-scale retrospective of his paintings in 1977 at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and then, a quarter century later, several exhibitions of his little-known, but extensive, work in photography.

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