Lot 24025: THOMAS WILMER DEWING (American 1851 - 1938)

THOMAS WILMER DEWING (American 1851 - 1938)
Lady with a Kite, circa 1898-1902
Pastel on paper
14-¾ x 9-½in.
Signed in graphite at lower left, T W Dewing with a diagonal line drawn beneath the surname
Abraded inscription by another hand in ink on verso: N o? t for sale?

PROVENANCE:
Paul Magriel Collection, no. PM-X177 (label verso);
Private Collection

Inspired by the work of James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Dewing began producing delicate pastel drawings on colored paper during the 1890s, a practice he continued until the early 1920s. While he had made drawings earlier in his career, Dewing had previously worked in monochromatic media or watercolor in a tighter academic style, and seldom explored the subject for which he became best known in his paintings, i.e. elegant women often lost in reverie or wandering in lush, highly atmospheric landscapes. By 1890, less than a year after Whistler's 1889 exhibition of pastel drawings at the Wunderlich Gallery in New York, which drew considerable critical attention, Dewing started using pastel in earnest. His first pastel dates to 1890 and his first recorded sale of a pastel was in December 1893, when he sold two nudes to Charles Lang Freer. A great admirer and patron of Whistler, Freer also became an important collector of Dewing's work.

As the present work demonstrates, the atmospheric possibilities of pastel suited Dewing's style of handling pigment and his preferred type of ethereal imagery. The iridescence of the woman's dress as well as a sense of windy movement is beautifully conveyed in Lady with a Kite through a blending and smudging of the chalks. The crisper outlines of the woman's lithe arms, waistline, and slender neck are achieved with the sharper edge of the pastel stick.

Scholars of Dewing's work have identified a number of factors which can serve as aids in establishing a chronology for the artist's largely undated corpus of pastels. These include: the type and color of paper, sheet size, and his manner of inscribing the drawings. While helpful, these rules of thumb are not absolute.

In emulation of Whistler's small format pastels, which measured a fairly consistent 10-½ x 6-¾ inches, Dewing worked on the same small-sized sheets from 1890 to circa 1915. Through the 1890s he often used the blue-gray paper Whistler himself preferred, the so-called "Whistler paper." In fact, in 1893, Freer took the liberty of sending Dewing some of the very paper Whistler used for his own work, although as Susan B. Hobbs noted, Dewing turned to a more finely textured paper than Whistler since his drawing style was smoother and also considerably more tonal than Whistler's (Susan B. Hobbs, The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing. Beauty Reconfigured, exh. cat., Washington and London, 1996, p. 199). From the mid 1910s into the early 1920s, when he produced pastels primarily for exhibition rather than for individual clients, Dewing used a larger paper, measuring 15 x 11 ½ inches. In addition to the glue-gray paper, Dewing also used beige, medium brown, and even deeper brown paper, the latter being particularly effective in achieving very low tonal contrast with his figurative elements. At first the artist merely signed his pastels "T.W. Dewing" but in 1909, according to his studio records, he also began adding a small number below the signature to keep track of the pastels when he sent them to exhibition.

Dating the present work on the basis of these general rules of thumb is not the best approach since the work is at once larger in format (like the later pastels), but bears no number next to the signature (a characteristic of the early works). In spite of this contradiction, it is possible to date Lady with a Kite quite accurately on the basis of style, subject, and signature type. The pastel is handled with more pressure and the body of the woman has a firm sense of volume, two elements which point to a date in the later 1890s. So, too, does the specific subject of women outside in a landscape, using their arms in an active way such that their limbs and torsos are in obvious contrapposto. For example, in Lady with a Kite, the figure's arms are pulled in the opposite direction from the hips and head. A similar effect can be found in figures populating Dewing's three-panel screen of Morning Glories of 1898 in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Hobbs, fig. 71, p. 140) and The Garland of 1899 in the collection of Peter G. Terian.

Nearly identical to the twist of the woman's strawberry blond head, and the line of her neck, ear, and cheek revealed by the swept up coiffure is the disposition of the head of the protagonist in Dewing's important work, The Spinet of circa 1901-2 (oil on panel, 15 ½ x 20 in.), in the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, a gift of Dewing's other most important patron, John Gellaty. The signature on The Spinet is very similar in style and placement to that of Lady with a Kite, possessing a forward slant and the same amount of space between the letters (Hobbs, cat. 38, p. 165).

Around the same time he drew Lady with a Kite, Thomas Dewing became a founding member of the Ten American Painters, a group of artists who seceded from the Society of American Artists in 1897 after becoming dissatisfied with its aesthetic aims and exhibition policies. Dewing represented the tonalist wing, while Childe Hassam was at the opposite pole with full-blown impressionism. Dewing is regarded as one of the most important figures associated with the Boston School. Pastels such as the present work were a significant facet of Dewing's oeuvre, and he exhibited them widely as finished works of art. As an important signal of this fact, they rarely occur without a signature.