Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, into an established New England family. He spent his elementary school years at Putnam Free School in Newbury. Upon graduation, he had wished to attend Amherst College, but a change in his father's financial situation made this impossible. Instead, at the age of 18, he divided his time between teaching elementary classes in Linebrook Parish and taking private instruction from the retired director of the Ipswich Female Seminary. These informal studies constituted Dow's college preparation. At the same time, Dow developed a love and appreciation for the New England craft tradition and an avid interest in the history of his native Ipswich. In 1879, at the suggestion of his mother, he began a pictorial survey of old Ipswich houses in straightforward pencil sketches. He also began to take an interest in color associations, and how colors could be playfully manipulated in total disregard of natural fact and association. These theories of color variation stayed with Dow, and it came to be the basis of his concentration on color woodblock prints a decade later.

In 1880, encouraged by friends, he began his first art lessons in the traditional late-nineteenth-century manner, with other like-minded students, in a Boston studio. This was followed by three years in a Parisian academy in 1884. He found his real love in landscape painting, which he pursued in the important rural artists' colonies of Pont-Aven and Concarneau in the northwestern province of Brittany, a coastal region he likened to his native Ipswich. Upon his return to the United States in 1889, he began to paint the understated landscape of surrounding Ipswich. He painted the long marshes dotted with haystacks, small anchorage and fishing community, white sand dunes, black tidal river, poplars, and oaks in delicate and poetic canvases.

Weary of the academicism he had learned abroad and frustrated by what he saw as the banal, pedantic approach of Boston art circles, he set out to train his eye and expand his understanding through independent study of various art forms of many cultures. This daunting task bore fruit on a night in February 1891, while pouring over a book on oriental art. For the first time, Dow took full stock of the Ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai, which he had doubtlessly seen but not fully appreciated in Paris and Pont-Aven. This discovery was only the first of a sequence of momentous events for Dow. Within the week he became acquainted with Ernest Fenollosa, the then curator of oriental art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was Fenollosa who led Dow to the ink landscapes of Sesshu and Shubun and introduced him to the mysteries of Zen painting. Fenollosa firmly believed in the imminent synthesis of eastern and western art in a new American style, and it was this tenet that he passed on to Dow.

In 1891, Dow founded the Ipswich Summer School of Arts, but he did not agree with the French academic teaching methods, so he looked at Japanese art to base his system of art education on. He published his new educational method in Composition in 1899, a book that went through more than twenty printings over the next four decades. Composition set forth a series of exercises to aid the pupil in understanding the principles set forth. At his summer school, he taught various crafts in addition to painting and printmaking, stressing the primacy of pure design and the value of handicrafts. In doing so, he was also keeping with the theories of Arts and Crafts reformers, who believed that crafts were equal in importance to the fine arts (craftsmen were considered to be artists, and there was no hierarchy between the two. Dow incorporated both sets of ideals - of Japanese and the Arts and Crafts principles – into his own teaching and personal artwork.

His discovery of Japanese prints also corresponded to the period in his career when he began to brighten his palette from the darker tones characteristic of his student days. He adopted the oriental medium of block printing as his own and experimented in his woodcuts with printing one on top of another to discover new color combinations. He said: 'One of the chief points about block printing is that it affords a valuable means for color study. With blocks as the starting point, the colors can vary infinitely. It is one thing to get a line, another to think up the color scheme, to know how you are going to choose when you have all the colors of the world before you.'

It wasn't merely the natural sense of order and form and color purity in Japanese prints that appealed to Dow – it was, as much as anything, the actual physicality of cutting the blocks, combined with the artistic rendering of the design and the final skill of printing. His method for making woodcuts adhered closely to the Japanese method. He printed several times on sheets of dry Japanese paper, the colors he used were powdered colors, mixed with water, and sparingly applied. In the end, Dow used a thin paste of gum to fix his tones. Throughout his career, even after years of teaching in New York, his woodcuts remained tributes to his hometown.

Dow's concentration on Japanese art continued to deepen over the next two decades. He kept striving to widen his audience through lectures, writings, and teachings. Advocating that art education, art-making, and collecting needed to experience a paradigm shift from a former hold on Western aesthetics to a newly defined Asian one. He concluded in a speech he gave titled Modernism in Art in 1917: 'Lectures and books upon the history of art are too often what the Japanese call “literary man's talk about painting” by people more experienced in literature than in visual art... no matter how learned a man may be in archaeology, history, and literature, I do not believe he can discuss fine arts effectively unless he has had some experience in creating art forms.'

He taught and worked with an approach to composition that was universal in that it could be applied to any medium. He applied his aesthetic principles to photography, for example, is an extension of the Arts and Crafts philosophy that 'art' should be exercised in 'industry'. He understood that photographs could be unique handcrafted artifacts as well, and he approached the problem of creating a photograph with the same theories of design and craftsmanship that he taught his students.

Dow died in New York in 1922, his methods having permanently impacted the mode of arts education in the western world. Besides his influence on his more famous students like Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he taught at Teachers College in 1914, and Max Weber, who studied design with him at Pratt Institute, he changed through his writings, work, and teaching, the way in which an entire generation of American art students would express itself. His work can currently be found in multiple institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The San Diego Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Close