American, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 6 April 1857, in Ipswich (Massachusetts); died 13 December 1922, in New York.
Painter, engraver (wood), draughtsman, designer, illustrator, potter, photographer. Landscapes.
Arthur Wesley Dow studied in Worcester with the painter Anna K. Freeland, then in Boston in the studio of the painter James M. Stone. In 1884 he travelled to Paris, where he was a pupil of Boulanger and of Lefebvre at the Académie Julian. On returning to Boston in 1889, he studied Aztec, Oceanian, African, Egyptian and, above all, Japanese art. In 1893 he became assistant curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the 1890s Dow became an avid photographer and made photographs as studies and as works of art. The majority of his photographs are of the landscape around Ipswich and botanical subjects. He printed most often in cyanotype, which renders the image in bright shades of blue and reveals Dow’s interest in tonality. For example, Dory (1904) explores the transitions between low-lying marsh grass and still water in an arrangement inspired by the Japanese woodblock prints he admired....
