Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures

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)

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)

Oakey and her young colleagues considered the exhibitions at the National Academy of Design stodgy and dominated by older members, so in 1874 they organized a sketch club in New York City, primarily composed of women. La Farge came down from Newport to join them, and he urged them to hold their own exhibition, which they did in the spring of 1875 at Cottier and Company in New York City. (13) This exhibition is considered a kind of salon des refuses that set the stage for a new art movement in the United States. A few years later it led to the founding of the Society of American Artists in New York City.

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Oakey went to Europe in mid-1876 to study with the aging French master Thomas Couture (1815-1879). She also visited England and Italy, probably in the company of Bartol, before returning to New York City in December. (14)

By 1880 Oakey had set about establishing herself as a painter of life-sized figures. She sold Girl with Violets of 1878 (unlocated) to the writer and diplomat John Hay (1838-1905), and her efforts were successful enough for the critic Samuel G. W. Benjamin (1837-1914) to write in 1880, "Miss M.R. Oakey [is] among the leading artists who are aiding the new art movement in New York." (15) In July she took a suite of rooms in the new Sherwood Studio building at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, an up-to-date and luxurious address for artists. In July 1880 the Art Amateur described her high prospects and her reputation for "life-size figures" and portraits, which she had shown in Boston, Saint Louis, London, and New York. (16)

In October 1880 Thomas Wilmer Dewing arrived in New York from Boston and appeared on Maria Oakey's doorstep with an introduction from mutual friends. Goodlooking and full of ambition, he swept her off her feet. At thirty-five she decided to marry Dewing, then twenty-nine, perhaps sensing in him the same dedication to art that drove her. The couple were engaged by Christmas 1880 and married on April 18, 1881, in an Episcopal ceremony.

She continued to paint and exhibit largesized canvases. Her Mother and Child (unlocated) dates from the year after their marriage. The subject was very much on her mind, since the couple lost an infant son in 1882. (17) A trip abroad in 1883, with a visit to the studio of the English artist Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898), took them away from their tragedy. Once back home, Maria Dewing curtailed her own work to help her husband by painting the backgrounds of his prize-winning compositions. Hymen of 1884-1886 (Cincinnati Museum of Art) and The Days of 1886 (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford) established her husband as a premier New York figure painter and gained him full membership in the National Academy of Design. (18)

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Maria Dewing herself remained outside the art establishment, a factor mitigated by the long-awaited birth of the couple's only child, Elizabeth Bartol Dewing, on November 26, 1885. In June 1886, at the invitation of their friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), who lived there, the Dewings traveled to Cornish, New Hampshire, for the first of what turned out to be eighteen summers. They rented and then purchased an-eighteenth-century farmhouse where at last they could indulge their love of gardening. There too Maria Dewing produced the finest works of her career. paintings of flowers growing in the garden. She was not alone in rendering living flowers, but she made them her special subject. Abstractly composed and brilliantly executed, the paintings were "modern" works--the term she used in her ledger to differentiate outdoor paintings from studio still lifes of flowers. (19)

Thomas Dewing undertook horticultural experiments to determine which plants could withstand the harsh New England winters, while Maria Dewing assuaged her "garden thirsty soul." (20) Their own house was ablaze with every shade of flower imaginable, starting a craze for gardening in Cornish, which was quickly growing into an artists' colony. New arrivals included the painters Kenyon Cox and Louise Howland King Cox, Charles Adams Platt, Annie Lazarus (see Fig. 4), Henry Oliver Walker and Laura Walker, Frances C. Houston, William Howard Hart, and Stephen Parrish and his son Maxfield Parrish.

"In Cornish I painted constantly in my garden," wrote Maria Dewing, (21) feeling that the flower offered a more "abstract and removed beauty" than the human figure. The beauty of flowers, moreover, was "more exquisite." But this kind of painting was demanding and required a "long apprenticeship in the garden." (22) She was in her mid-forties when she produced her first outdoor painting in Cornish, a depiction of growing roses now unlocated that she dated as 1891 in her ledger. In that year she also produced Poppies and Italian Mignonette (frontispiece and Pl. II), which she called "modern," perhaps due to the cropped edges of a subject that seems to extend beyond the borders of the canvas. She presented the canvas to the art collector Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), who had employed Thomas Dewing to design the gardens and interior color scheme of his shingle style house then under construction in Detroit. Thomas Dewing was also a buying agent in New York City for Freer, who had recently begun to purchase Japanese prints. Maria Dewing's painting was a natural choice for Freer; for the blossoms float, almost disembodied, on the surface of the design in the manner seen in Japanese flower prints. However, she sought a middle ground between purely decorative flatness and the illusionism of Western art. As a true gardener she was wedded to what was really there: "When I paint flowers, I paint more than I see. I paint what I know is there. For example, I know how the poppy bursts its calyx, so that when I paint poppies they are true to nature." She instructed a younger artist, "What you want to do is to see more & ever to try to pierce the mystery to see & to see & let the sight dominate you." (23)

As it turns out, her "seeing" was as much in the mind as it was in the eye. After a spate of large pictures painted in the garden, all now unlocated, (24) she created Garden in May (Pl. I), considered today as her most famous work. Long thought to have been painted in her Cornish garden, it was, according to her ledger, begun in Giverny, France, in 1895 and finished when she returned home.

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Thomas and Maria Dewing arrived in London on October 12, 1894, lodging next to Burne-Jones's studio. There they very probably saw his four Briar Rose paintings of 1870-1890 (Buscot Park, Oxfordshire), with figures framed against a wall of dense roses. (25)

Despite the fact that Thomas Dewing worked with James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in London, the Dewings became tired of the city's rainy weather, and in April 1895 they moved to Paris, and then, after a period of weeks, they moved to the nearby village of Giverny. There they had many acquaintances among the young American artists who had established an art colony near Claude Monet (1840-1926) and his famous gardens. However, Thomas Dewing became restless and homesick. They rented a place that was adjacent to the Villa Besche, the house leased by Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937) and his wife, the artist Mary Fairchild MacMonnies (1858-1946). (26)

Thomas Dewing, who did most of his painting in a studio, produced nothing in Giverny. But his wife was accustomed to working outdoors, and probably began Garden in May at the MacMonnieses, for Villa Besche was noted for its flower-filled walled garden. Her painting of roses appears to be an uncomposed scene ostensibly just encountered by the artist. The quality of serendipity may account for its designation in her ledger as a "modern" work started during the summer of 1895 in Giverny and on which she worked subsequently in Cornish. This relatively long period of time demonstrates that the painting was not a quickly captured impressionist moment. The subject is handled in the French manner to be sure: the composition sweeps across the canvas diagonally revealing a bed of roses and carnations and just a hint of the box borders so typical of Giverny. By continuing to work on the canvas in Cornish, Maria Dewing blurred issues of time and place, running counter to her published edict that flowers should be painted exactly as they are seen in the garden and in their naturally occurring relationships. (27) It is possible, therefore, that she used photographs to help her complete the picture, for many artists of the Giverny colony were keen photographers. (28)

The Dewings surprised everyone by returning suddenly to the United States in July 1895 and going directly to Cornish, where presumably the later blooming New England roses were out for her continued work on Garden in May. The delicate, faceted leaves, visible through transparent petals, suggest that Maria Dewing made changes before selling the painting. It was displayed at the 1897 Society of American Artists exhibition in New York City, lent by Edith Gellatly (nee Rogers; d. 1913), herself a still-life painter.

The period was one of great productivity for Maria Dewing, but that did not keep her from helping her husband. The underlying frustrations of such an arrangement were suggested in a letter written by her old friend Helena de Kay Gilder to Mary Hallock Foote in reference to another (unnamed) married woman painter and her artist spouse:

Is all her eight or ten years of hard work to go for nothing? Is she to end like Maria Oakey in painting backgrounds & influencing her husband? Between them they might do something far better (as have the Dewings) than either one separate--but the result (like the baby) will be called by his name & if, as is evident, she has some amour-propre--she will feel badly at having people say that, after all, she had amounted to nothing--like all other "art women." (29)

On the eve of the new century, Maria Dewing painted a grand work that is a tribute to the Asian art she probably saw on visits to Freer's collection in Detroit. Entitled Iris at Dawn (Pl. III), it was completed in June 1899, according to her ledger. When she showed it some years later at the National Academy of Design, the critic Royal Cortissoz (1869-1948) wrote that it seemed "fragrant with garden witchery," suggesting an otherworldly quality. (30) Yet, the painting is clearly derived from the observed world. Aida White (who knew the artist during the 1920s) remembered that Maria Dewing arose early in the morning, when the blooms were tightly furled. She sat down next to the bed of iris and watched the plants as they were struck by the light of the rising sun, watching the blossoms open in the warming rays. Seated under her subject, she painted from a vantage point that encouraged the viewer to feel immersed in the flowers, looking up and out through them. (31) Yet, since she felt there should not be in a painting "mere representation, (but) the art of picture-making," (32) the flat, unmodeled, spear-shaped leaves recall the prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). (33) Like La Farge, she merged the quality of flowers growing in the garden with elements derived from Japanese design. Asian art, moreover, may have suggested to her the transience of life with its cycle of birth, maturity, and decay echoed here in the various stages of the iris from tight bud to full bloom.

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Maria Dewing painted her large tour de force A Rose Garden (Pl. IV) during the Dewings' last summer in their beloved Cornish garden, where the carefully tended beds stretched from the roofed veranda of the house to the drive (see Fig. 5). The painting has a wilder quality than the French-inspired A Garden in May. There is no hint of an organized garden. The viewer is immersed in foliage of thin transparent petals and leathery leaves. Crowded and cloistered, the work recalls Burne-Jones's Briar Rose paintings. But the touches of vibrant red suggest new growth, while animating, undulating shadows reveal hidden blossoms. The artist won a bronze medal for this painting and for Carnations (Pl. VI) at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York.

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When the Dewings left Cornish in 1902 they spent several unsuccessful summers on Long Island before establishing a new vacation place in 1905 near relatives in the Green Hill section of New Hampshire, just on the Maine state line. In their "Paradise in Maine," as Maria Dewing called it, (34) they had two hundred acres of woods and a barebones shack without plumbing where Thomas Dewing liked to cook on a primitive stove. They managed to carve a pair of gardens from the woods, and one day they planted masses of poppies that Maria Dewing painted (Pl. VII). Except for the canvas on the frontispiece and in Plate II, this is the only poppy subject she ever did, and may well have been the single garden painting she produced in Green Hill. Both she and her husband complained about how hard it was to paint in that "wilderness of mountains and forest and streams." (35)

It is little wonder, then, that Maria Dewing turned to studio still lifes such as The Rose (Pl. V), "a life-size" canvas, as she called it. It is reminiscent of her husband's work. But while his themes remain mysterious and subtle, her approach is direct, accessible, and dramatic.

In the spring of 1907 she staged a solo exhibition in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which included a broad array of early and late works ranging from studio still lifes to garden subjects and figure works. The show prompted one critic to write:

Here is a woman who has gone out into the fields and gardens and painted her floral models with such keen appreciation of their decorative value with such a nice sense of color composition that she has produced decorative canvases of the highest order--things of beauty which it would be a pleasure to have on one's wall. (36)

Large and ambitious figure works followed. (37)

Yet, despite her grand plans, the great 1913 Armory show in New York City brought European modernism to the United States, changing the artistic climate in which she worked and making her figure studies less appealing than they might have been before. So, with one exception, she presented studio still lifes for her second solo show at M. Knoedler and Company in New York City in 1914. Their striking quality prompted Cortissoz to declare that the artist inhabited "a place apart in American art," due to her originality and her authority. (38) The still life entitled Spring Flowers (Pl. VIII) shows that she was not afraid to experiment, even with a conventional subject.

In the 1920s, while caring for her two granddaughters, the artist continued to work, writing in 1924, "life without paint[ing] is hardly life at all in the Dewing family." (39) She finished The Costumer (Pl. IX), her penultimate painting, with beautiful passages that recall her talents as a still-life painter. Late in 1926 she began Girl with Pomegranates (unlocated). Describing the act of painting that year she wrote: "I wonder if there is anything else in this world that one plunges so deep for or works so hard for. Swimming the English chanel [sic] is a mere bagatelle in comparison." (40) The National Academy of Design asked her to submit a painting to their winter exhibition in 1927, for which she lent The Mother (1904, reworked 1927; private collection), a large, life-sized canvas that was still on view when Maria Dewing died of a heart attack on December 13 in her New York studio. She was eighty-two years old.

All her life Dewing had longed for greatness as a figure painter, but it is her flower works that remain her greatest legacy. Her fellow painter Abbott Thayer explained this success in a letter to her. He marveled at her ability to carry through to completion each flower of individual importance while bringing each into "tune" with everything else in the picture. (41) Her genius was to give a sense of immediacy to visions constructed slowly as works of art.

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(1) Author's interview with the writer and painter Nelson C. White (1900-1989), January 1978.

(2) Arthur Edwin Bye, Pots and Pans: or, Studies in Still-life Painting (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1921), p. 200.

(3) Maria Oakey Dewing, Fryeburg, Maine, to Nelson C. White, August 30, 1927 (private collection).

(4) Ibid.

(5) Dewing, New York City, to Nelson C. White, March 14, 1927 (private collection), writes of her "delightful talks of everything artistic" with her father and of her mother's first marriage to Gilbert Stuart Newton, a portrait painter who introduced Sally Sullivan to the highest cultural circles of the day. As "Mrs. Oakey," Sally Sullivan wrote From Attic to Cellar: A Book for Young Housekeepers (1879), a work wrongly attributed to Maria Dewing, who, however, did write Beauty in Dress (1881) and Beauty in the Household (1882).

(6) Dewing to Nelson C. White, August 30, 1927, quoted in Jennifer Martin, "Portraits of Flowers: The Out-of-Door Still-Life Paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing," American Art Review, vol. 4 (December 1977), p. 52.

(7) An Exhibition of Paintings by Maria Oakey Dewing (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1907). The entry for this painting reads: "Flower Pictures Painted in the Studio, #10 Souvenir de Mal Maison Roses, Painted in extreme youth, lent by Miss Bartol."

(8) Maria Oakey Dewing, "Abbott Thayer. A Portrait and an Appreciation," International Studio, vol. 74 (August 1921), p. vii; and interview by the author with Evelyn Foote Gardiner, a granddaughter of Mary Hallock Foote.

(9) Sarah Burns, "The courtship of Winslow Homer,"The Magazine ANTIQUES, vol. 161, no. 2 (February, 2002), pp. 69-75.

(10) Maria Oakey Dewing, "Flower Painters and What the Flower Offers to Art," Art and Progress, vol. 6 (June 1915), p. 255. For a discussion of Oakey's visits to Newport, see Helena de Kay, Newport, to Mary Hallock, August 1872, and John La Farge to de Kay, July 5, 1873 (both collection of a descendant of Richard Watson Gilder and Helena de Kay Gilder, by courtesy of James L. Yarnall). I would like to thank James Yarnall for his help on the issue of La Farge and plein-air painting at this time in La Farge's career.

(11) James L. Yarnall, Nature Vivante: The Still Lifes of John La Farge (Jordan-Volpe Gallery, New York, 1995), p. 32.

(12) There are frequent titles of flower works in exhibition reviews, but it is unclear from the descriptions whether they are studio works or outdoor subjects. For example, in the spring of 1873 she exhibited Yellow Roses and Roses and Lilies at the National Academy of Design. Both were very probably painted outdoors the year before, in the company of La Farge and de Kay. The two canvases drew a long notice in the New York Daily Graphic on May 14, 1873: "Miss Oakey has been a pupil of Lafarge and doubtless reflects his manner as a great many pupils do that of their masters, but she also does something more," avowed the critic, who admired her ability to depict texture. See also "Art Notes," Daily Graphic, May 23, 1873, which gave Oakey a backhanded compliment by asserting that another periodical had reviewed her picture appreciatively, thinking it was by a male artist.

(13) The other participants were primarily students of William Morris Hunt: other than Oakey, they included Elizabeth Bartol, de Kay, Elizabeth Boott, and Helen M. Knowlton. The men included Abbott Handerson Thayer, Francis Lathrop, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

(14) While she was gone, news of her trip and the pictures she showed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia appeared in "Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia appeared in "Centennial Notes," Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 15, 1876, p. 5.

(15) Samuel G. W. Benjamin, Art in America: A Critical and Historical Sketch (New York, 1880), p. 207.

(16) Some Lady Artists of New York," Art Amateur, July 1880, p. 28. Her life-sized works noted in the article included A Woman Serving, Violets, A Portrait of a Boy in Black Velvet, An Infant, and a portrait of the two-year-old son of Henry Harper. All are unlocated today.

(17) Interview with Nelson C. White, 1978.

(18) When Maria Dewing sent a photograph of The Days to a friend, she wrote wistfully, "I hope you will find that I had something to do with it, for I find my husband's work to be more mine in spirit than my own can be" (Dewing to Ella Condie Lamb, December 1, 1888). The letter is in the collection of Barea Lamb Seeley, to whom I am grateful for sharing the papers of Ella Lamb (1862-1936) with me.

(19) The ledger, entitled "Partial List of Paintings MROD," is in the possession of a Dewing family descendant.

(20) Dewing to Edwin Coupland Shaw, June 20, 1923 (Edwin Coupland Shaw papers, archives of the Akron Art Museum, Ohio).

(21) Ibid.

(22) Dewing, "Flower Painters," pp. 255, 257, 262.

(23) Dewing to Nelson C. White, August 30, 1927.

(24) The lost works date to 1894: a pair of large canvases originally in the collection of Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts (Lilies and Delphinium and Calla Lilies), and a very large work sold to John Gellatly (1852-1931) called Lilac Bush.

(25) Two of the paintings, The Bower Maidens and Sleeping Beauty, remained unfinished in his studio until 1894 and 1895, when the Dewings were next door. Earlier versions were exhibited at the Agnew Gallery in London, where they were the talk of the town. Maria's other connection to Burne-Jones was Francis Lathrop (1849-1909), her old friend and classmate at the National Academy of Design school, who became Burne-Jones's studio assistant. It is not hard to imagine how the Briar Rose paintings could have inspired her own rose garden paintings. See Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998), p. 110.

(26) See DeWitt M. Lockman interview with Frederick William MacMonnies, DeWitt M. Lockman interviews with artists (manuscript department, New-York Historical Society, New York City, on microfilm, reel 502, no. 10, Archives of American Art). There, MacMonnies said he worked in Paris throughout the summer of 1895. It appears that he and Dewing stayed in Paris a good deal while their wives were in Giverny. Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931) had gone to Giverny in 1888 and 1889, drawn there by his friend Theodore Earl Butler (1860-1936), who married Monet's stepdaughter, Suzanne Hoschede. During the early 1890s William Howard Hart, who worked frequently in Cornish, New Hampshire, was in Giverny, as was Dewing's own student Henry Prellwitz (see William H. Gerdts, Monet's Giverny: An Impressionist Colony [Abbeville, New York, 1993], pp. 13, 32). See also Claire Joyes, The Taste of Giverny: At Home with Monet and the American Impressionists (Flammarion, Paris, 2001), which includes photographs of Hart with Monet and his family.

(27) Dewing, "Flower Painters," p. 262.

(28) Among them were Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) and Theodore Robinson (1852-1896). Robinson photographed many of the paintings he created in Giverny. And Maria Dewing herself had earlier used photography as a basis for some of her drawings for magazine illustrations.

(29) Helena de Kay Gilder to Mary Hallock Foote, c. 1894 (collection of Evelyn Foote Gardiner).

(30) Royal Cortissoz, "Art Exhibitions," New York Tribune, December 16, 1908, p. 7.

(31) Aida White interview with the author, October 11, 1999. The wife of Nelson C. White, Aida White met the Dewings in 1926, and she visited them at their studio/apartment at 12 West Eighth Street in New York City. She was later the owner of Iris at Dawn, after it left the possession of Maria's cousin Elizabeth Bartol.

(32) Dewing, "Flower Painters," p. 257.

(33) See Yarnall, Nature Vivante, p. 47; and Katsushika Hokusai's Iris and Grasshopper, c. 1832 (Art Institute of Chicago).

(34) Dewing to Henry C. White, October 17, 1924 (private collection). Henry White was the father of Nelson C. White.

(35) Dewing to Shaw, January 21, 1923 (Shaw papers).

(36) Francis J. Ziegler, "In the World of Art," Philadelphia Record, March 3, 1907, p. 54 (scrapbook in the archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and on microfilm in Archives of American Art).

(37) These were The Harp Player (destroyed) and The Fete in the Garden or L'Alegro (unlocated). The latter measured about 60 by 84 inches and depicted twenty-one figures.

(38) Royal Cortissoz, "Little Art Show of the Spring," New York Tribune, March 17, 1914, p. 9.

(39) Dewing to Henry C. White, October 17, 1924.

(40) Dewing to Henry C. White, September 25, 1926 (private collection).

(41) Abbott Handerson Thayer, Dublin, New Hampshire, to Dewing, June 10, 1899 (private collection).

SUSAN A. HOBBS, a former curator of American art at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., is compiling a catalogue raisonne of the works of both Maria and Thomas Dewing.

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