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Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Susan A. Hobbs

"I hold my heart in my hand when I paint." Maria Oakey Dewing once told a young art student, and she invites us to share these emotions with her through her perceptive painter's eye. (1) With their cutoff foregrounds, her compositions seem to continue the subject into our own space. We are immersed in a tangle of delicate leaves and flowers that are rendered with the artist's characteristic light touch.

So distinctive are these paintings that in her day they were called "absolutely unique." (2)

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In addition to these compositions, her career also encompassed some landscape paintings, portraits, and figure paintings, most of which are unlocated today. In fact, she longed for recognition as a figure painter. "I dreamed of groups & figures in big landscapes & still I see them," she recalled at the end of her career, when she considered such works more significant than her flower subjects. (3) She would be surprised to find her reputation reestablished today, once again, by the floral works she undervalued. Her Poppies and Italian Mignonette (frontispiece and Pl. II) and A Rose Garden (Pl. IV) commanded more than one million dollars each at auction at Sotheby's in New York City, in 2000 and 2001 respectively. Carnations (Pl. VI) brought a substantial price as well at Sotheby's, New York, in 2002. Until very recently, these prices were far higher than those paid for paintings by her husband, Thomas Wilmer Dewing (see Fig. 4), a much praised figure painter whose career overshadowed hers.

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A large man with an even larger personality, Dewing was a founding member of the Ten American Painters, a group of American impressionist artists, and a leader of the celebrated art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire. Maria Oakey, as she was born, was equally ambitious and stubborn. At a young age she determined to become a painter: "I ... was swept with desire for art & achievement in it--no the expression of the passion for it & reverence for it--no luxury no affection out weighed it," she recalled of her youth. (4) Born in New York City on October 27, 1845, she was fortunate that her parents' artistic interests encouraged her aspirations. Her mother, Sally Sullivan, was born in Boston and had lived in London as the teenage wife of the painter Gilbert Stuart Newton (1794-1835), a nephew of the painter Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). (5) As a young widow, she returned to New York City where she married William Francis Oakey (b.c.1823), to whom she bore ten children, six of whom survived. Oakey was a prosperous thread importer who traced his ancestry to English landed gentry.

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Maria, who pronounced her first name in the British manner, with a long "i," keenly felt her ties to such an illustrious heritage. Despite the hard times that eventually befell the family, Maria studied at home with a tutor. At first she was torn between becoming a writer or a painter, but at seventeen she decided to focus on art. "It is easy to write," she declared, "it is almost impossible to paint." (6) Her earliest known work was Souvenir de Mal Maison Roses (1862, destroyed), (7) a studio still life that she gave to her beloved second cousin Elizabeth Howard Bartol (see Fig. 3). An artist as well, Bartol lived in a grand family house on Chestnut Street in Boston that was designed by Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844) and built for the mutual great-grandparents of Bartol and Oakey. Maria Oakey visited there often and joined her cousin in studying with the Boston painter William Morris Hunt (1824-1879).

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In New York City, Maria Oakey studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women from 1868 to 1871 under the physician and painter Dr. William Rimmer (1816-1899). She learned to paint in oil and water-color and took classes in design and composition along with her lifelong friends Mary Stone, Mary Hallock (later Mrs. Arthur De Wint Foote), Olivia Ward, and Helena de Kay (later Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder). (8) She much admired the pretty dark-haired de Kay (see Fig. 2) for whom Winslow Homer (1836-1910) nursed an unrequited love. (9) She went on to study at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1871 to 1875, eventually taking a life class. The artists, among them George de Forest Brush, Julian Alden Weir, Frederick Stuart Church, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Francis Lathrop, and the writer Henry James, gathered in the studio apartment that Oakey and de Kay shared on Broadway in 1873. In 1875 Oakey and other academy students left to establish the now renowned Art Students League.

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During the summers of 1872 and 1873 Oakey visited de Kay in Newport, Rhode Island, and there they took informal outdoor painting lessons from the highly respected painter John La Farge (1835-1910), whom Oakey believed was unsurpassed as a painter of flowers. (10) La Farge worked from natural sources, but his compositions correspond to the "stylized realism expounded by Hokusai ... [and] Hiroshige," as James L. Yarnall has noted. (11) Oakey's emphasis at this time on close-up views into a thicket of flowers and foliage was probably the result of her work with La Farge. However, there are no surviving examples of her early work to confirm this. (12)

Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Susan A. Hobbs

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