1895
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Boats at Rest is a 1895 oil by Arthur Wesley Dow, a American Impressionism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
You see a quiet riverbank at dusk, with two small boats pulled up on the grass and a few bare trees against a pink sky. Dow painted this after studying Japanese prints. He cut off the edges like a snapshot, so the scene feels cropped and close. The colors are flat—no deep shadows—but still bright, almost like a poster. If you like this, look up the technique called *glazing*.
In 1891 Arthur Wesley Dow began to engage seriously with the formal elements of Japanese art in his prints and oil paintings. In works such as Boats at Rest , he depicted locales around his native Ipswich, Massachusetts, using the radical cropping, elevated perspective, and flattened pictorial space characteristic of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock) prints. His palette of bold colors, however, is more akin to the work of French Post-Impressionist artists such as Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. Dow’s Japanese-inspired theories of composition, which he outlined both in his publications and in the…
Private collection, New England, to 1990; Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1990; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990.
Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Arthur Wesley Dow and the American Arts and Crafts Movement, Oct. 8, 1999–Jan. 7, 2000. Art Institute of Chicago, Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago , Nov. 7, 2009–Jan. 31, 2010, cat. 37. Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 , Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 13.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Arthur Wesley Dow (April 6, 1857 – December 13, 1922) was an American painter, printmaker, photographer and an arts educator.
See the richer artist page
