The Gilded Age in American Art

Thomas W. Dewing (1851-1938) was best known for his elegant and refined depictions of women in sparsely decorated dreamlike interiors. Dewing often painted women playing musical instruments, reading to one another, or gossiping. Dewing's work reflects his life-long interest in music, poetry, and art.

In Green and Gold, Dewing combines a monochromatic color scheme and hazy atmosphere that seem to merge the figure and setting.

Visual Discussion Starters

What are the predominant colors?
Are the colors bright or subdued?
Dewing was known for his use of a soft, monochromatic color scheme.

Describe the quality of the lines.
Are they hard and distinct or soft and hazy?
Where does the figure end and the background begin?
Is the space deep or shallow?

Quiet and contemplative might be used to describe the mood. What other words would apply?

Dewing reduced the palette to a monochromatic color scheme and used effects of light and atmosphere that veiled the image to produce a soft hazy quality. Art historians called this style Tonalism.

Cultural/Historical Discussion Starters

Consider how this work relates to the Gilded Age.

Key Points:

• Idealization of and fascination with women
• Artists and wealthy patrons collaborating as never before in U.S.
• Influence of European art and culture
• Impact of new scientific and religious theories

For Dewing, the female represented an ideal form of beauty. He believed that "women provide meditation between nature and civilization because of their spiritual and natural associations" (Hobbs). He called his images "decoration" because of the lack of narration and minimal detail. Dewing often depicted woman as refined and cultured, lounging around with seemingly nothing to do. But many women of the 1880s were beginning to take an active role in public life. They were independent, self-supporting, and active in suffrage. In 1922, critic Catherine Beach Ely wrote about the contradiction between the artist's images of women and the realities of their lifestyle,"They [Dewing's women] are not the restless women of today-aggressive efficiency is far from them; they can do nothing and do it beautifully....[Dewing's] mood of quiet contemplation almost amounts to an ironic comment on the strenuousness of the typical modern woman."*

Thomas Wilmer Dewing Biography

• 1851 - Born May 4 in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, to Paul Dewing and Sophronia Durant. Childhood interests included playing the violin and drawing
• 1874 - Listed as "artist" in Boston city directory. Studies paintings in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, especially the works of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779)
• 1876 - Travels to Paris and studies at the Académie Julian; takes courses on anatomical drawing and modeling taught Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Becomes friends with American painter William Merritt Chase
• 1878 - Returns to Boston. Becomes an assistant at the newly founded art school of the Museum of Fine Arts. Participates in several Boston exhibitions
• 1880 - Moves to New York City. Elected to the Society of American Artists, which had formed out of dissatisfaction with the National Academy of Design
• 1881 - Hired as an instructor at Art Students League, where he renews his friendship with Chase
• 1881 - Marries artist Maria Oakey. First New York showing of James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl. Dewing's work is influenced by Whistler's monochromatic palette and flat, shallow space and his portrayal of elegant, cultured women.
• 1883 - Travels briefly to Europe and visits London studio of English artist Edward Burne-Jones
• 1885 - First visit to the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he would later set up a summer home
• 1886 - Moves to the famous Studio Building at 3 North Washington Circle in New York. Regularly exhibits in New York shows and elsewhere. Begins work on The Days, a large multi-figured painting that establishes his reputation and wins the Clark Prize at the National Academy of Design. The Days was inspired by a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem of the same name.
• 1887 - Edward Adams, a New Jersey banker and businessman, buys Dewing's Tobias and the Angel on the advice of architect Stanford White. White designed the home of Adams, Rohallion. White was considered the primary patron of Dewing during this time and designed many frames for Dewing's paintings.
• 1888 - Takes fewer portrait commissions because of belief that "portrait painting is not art." Begins a new phase in style and subject matter, in which elegant women in sparsely decorated monochromatic rooms and soft, hazy landscapes dominate his work. He draws on inspiration from the paintings of the Dutch artist Vermeer (1632-1675) and from the aesthetics of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and the English artist Albert Moore (1841-1893).
• 1890 - Meets Charles Lang Freer of Detroit. Freer becomes his most important patron.
• 1895 - Moves to Paris in April and takes a studio next to Frederick MacMonnies. Returns to New York in July after much homesickness
• 1897 - Resigns from the Society of American Artists and, along with other Boston and New York artists, organizes The Ten American Painters, known as The Ten. Most of The Ten worked in Impressionist styles that had little in common with Dewing's more subdued technique.
• 1898 - First retrospective of 13 paintings opens Boston. First annual exhibition of The Ten opens in New York
• 1922 - Begins working almost exclusively in pastels for the next five years
• 1923 - Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., opens with a room dedicated to Dewing's work.
• 1924 - Suffers a nervous breakdown
• 1930 - Stops painting
• 1938 - Dies on November 5 in New York