Notes
Property of the Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Fund, Cleveland, Ohio
With its superb treatment of color and gentle, diffused light, Lady in a Purple Dress is a masterpiece of Tonalist painting and exemplary of Thomas Wilmer Dewing's finest works. A master draftsman and exquisite colorist, Dewing created some of the most serenely beautiful paintings of his time.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dewing began his formal art education in 1876 when he traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian under Gustave-Clarence-Rudolphe Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. Dewing's affinity for the aesthetic of his mentors' paintings carried over into his early body of work. Upon his return to Boston, he taught at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts until, in 1880, he moved to New York City, where he lived for the next fifty years. While in New York Dewing met and became close friends with the architect Stanford White, who helped him sell his first Tonalist painting, The Days (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, fig. 1), a painting unquestionably influenced by Dewing's exposure to the aesthetic movements in Europe. Dewing subsequently chose White's frames for many of his great masterworks, including the present painting, Lady in a Purple Dress.
A critical turning point for Dewing took place only one year after his move to New York when James McNeill Whistler's iconic masterwork Symphony in White, No. 1 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., fig. 2) was exhibited for the first time. The Tonalist movement in American art was already underway, gaining momentum in the years following the Civil War, in response to a growing awareness of European trends in art. Yet the movement did not fully develop as a distinctive American phenomenon until the 1880s when, partly in reaction against the rise in popularity of French Impressionism, some artists honed their works to create harmonious, reductive images that merged Barbizon influences with the refinement associated with the art of Whistler. Few artists applied the manner of Tonalism to figural work, and Dewing is most notable in that arena. Indeed, Dewing was so taken with Whistler's simplified, modern style that he "moved away from the antiquated figures and inscrutable narratives of his early work toward greater simplification of subject matter, compositions, and color schemes. The titles of his paintings from this period, such as Lady in Yellow and Girl in Black, indicate the artist's increasing devotion to a Whistlerian aesthetic." (L. Merrill, After Whistler: The Artist and his Influence on American Painting, New Haven, Connecticut, 2003, p. 174) The woman seated in profile in Lady in a Purple Dress clearly echoes the compositional elements found in some of Whistler's greatest works.
The artist's predominant theme of elegant women sitting in spare, yet beautiful, interiors emerged in the 1890s. In Lady in a Purple Dress, Dewing evokes a sense of pensive melancholy through his skillful manipulation of a narrow tonal range to record the subtleties of the scene and capture the essence of his sitter's character. Typical of Dewing's works, she is dignified, refined and elegant. At the same time, her detachment seems at once mysterious, enigmatic, and soulful. Dewing imbues the scene with an aura of quietude and tension, recalling elements of much earlier painters, such as Johannes Vermeer (fig. 3), who was much admired at the time. While certainly inspired by the Dutch master in subject and mood, technically Dewing worked quite differently. Vermeer built up his forms three-dimensionally using layers of paint, whereas Dewing created ephemeral and delicate Tonalist compositions, painting some areas so thinly that the ground becomes almost part of the composition. Lady in a Purple Dress exhibits the stippling and fine brushwork characteristic of his mature paintings.
By the late 1880s, Dewing had begun to paint women in sparsely furnished interiors or in freely painted landscapes inspired by the surroundings of Cornish, New Hampshire, where he summered with other artist friends. Recognizing the commercial need to appeal to a broad audience, Dewing turned mainly to the popular subject of interiors, a theme often visited by well regarded contemporary artists such as William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent. Yet Dewing's style is not at all similar to these artists' lavish and vibrant interior scenes. Chase and Sargent's paintings present generally straighforward scenes. In contrast, the subjects of Dewing's paintings appear somewhat mystical and enigmatic. The art historians Susan A. Hobbes and Barbara Dayer Gallati write: "Dewing avoided familiar poses and compositions, presenting his subjects in subtle psychological terms rather than in easily understood narrative terms. He sought what was then described as a 'grace of sparseness' and an 'astringent loveliness.' Suggesting the theme of separation and loss in Brocart de Venise (Washington University Gallery of Art, Saint Louis, Missouri, fig. 4), for example, Dewing juxtaposed an austere composition and a sensuous and evocative paint surface. This painting won the 1905 Lippincott Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Such interiors represent the part of Dewing's oeuvre that kept him most in the public eye." ("Thomas Wilmer Dewing, An Artist Against the Grain," Magazine Antiques, March 1996, p. 421)
With few exceptions, Dewing's body of work focused on women. During the first two decades of his career he used them as decorative elements within his landscape paintings. Although "as time went on he reduced his subjects almost entirely to two opposites, neither of which fully conforms to the standard genre modes of his contemporaries. The first suggests the possibilities of a narrative. The other essentially eliminates narrative by picturing only a single seated figure shown either in (or almost in) profile or frontally with the arms open in what can be called the display pose. This type of repetition calls to mind Monet's serial images of poplars and haystacks. It is a correspondence that adds new significance to Dewing's paintings, if they too are considered in the context of serial production." ("Thomas Wilmer Dewing, An Artist Against the Grain," p. 426)
Kenyon Cox, a contemporary of Thomas Dewing and a fellow member of the Cornish Art Colony, wrote: "Some hundreds of years hence the historian of our time may be puzzled by Mr. Dewing's treatment of our life, and wonder if the ladies of the day usually sat in such bare rooms or wore low-cut dresses in the daytime; but what does it matter? It is a fantasy, but what a delicate one!" (as quoted in S. Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured: The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Brooklyn, New York, 1996, p. 31) With Dewing's visionary approach, paintings such as Lady in a Purple Dress elicit responses in which the notion of splendor is paramount. His concern for the figure, his re-evaluation of the conventions of beauty and his creative Tonalist approach to his subject set Dewing apart and rank him as one of the most ground-breaking artists of his time.
