Arthur Wesley Dow Papers

Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1857. After studying painting in Worcester and Boston, where he was influenced by the Barbizon-inspired work of William Morris Hunt, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Academie Julian with Louis Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, both of whom were also to influence Childe Hassam. After his return to Boston, he met Ernest Fenollosa, who introduced him to the Japanese art that would come to play a significant role in his life and work. He often used Japanese compositional techniques in his own paintings, and as an art educator incorporated many of the philosophical principles of Japanese painting. His interest in non-Western art was not limited to Japan, however; he also studied Aztec, Oceanian, African, and Egyptian art. In 1893 he began working under Fenollosa as Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He also had his own school, the Ipswich Summer School of Art, from 1891 until 1907, in which he taught painting, applied arts, and engraving. Although many educators considered Dow’s methods controversial, Frederic Bayley Pratt offered him a position in 1895 as an instructor of composition and design at Pratt Institute, which he accepted. One of his students at the Institute was the Expressionist Max Weber. In 1903 he left Pratt Institute to head the Art Department at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. He also taught at the Art Students’ League. His publications include Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1898), a teaching manual that provided the basic principles of the American Arts and Crafts Movement; and Theory and Practice for Teaching Art (1908). Dow, who died in 1922, exerted a strong influence on American art in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially in the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe, and has been shown in retrospectives.

Source: Benezit Dictionary of Artists (Paris: Grund, 2006), s.v. “Dow, Arthur Wesley.”