Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow ( born April 6, 1857 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, † December 13, 1922 in New York City ) was an American landscape painter, printer, photographer, and an influential art theorist and teacher.

Life

Arthur W. Dow was the eldest son of Mary and David Dow patch. As a young man he became interested in the colonial history of Ipswich, which he created the series Antiquarian Papers, together with the Reverend Augustine Caldwell from 1875 to 1880, the Dow contained drawings of local colonial architecture. From 1880 Dow took art courses in the Boston studio of James M. Stone. Between 1884 and 1889, Dow held in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. In Brittany he practiced in the plein-air painting. His landscape paintings were shown at the Paris Salon. After his return to the United States, he opened his own studio in Boston, where his long and successful teaching career began.

Dow taught over 30 years at several American art schools, such as at the Art Students League, at Teachers College, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, as well as his own Ipswich Summer School of Art, his ideas and teaching methods were revolutionary in his time. He dealt with Chinese and Japanese art, came to a rejection of traditional realism and expressed the opinion that the artist should not imitate nature, but also bring their ideas and sentiments expressed what was achieved through a harmonious arrangement of lines, colors and contrasts could be. He referred in this connection to the Japanese design principle Notan, which can be found in Sumi -e, and so provides a 'hard' contrast by the arrangement of lights and shadows.

Dow put his teaching methods and theories in the 1899 published book Composition: A Series of Exercises in front of Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. He was teacher of many well-known artists such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Georgia O'Keeffe, Max Weber and the Byrdcliffe Colony.