The Gilded Age in American Art

Evaluation | Curriculum Connections | Resources | Tours 1876 - 1917

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