Description
PROPERTY FROM AN AMERICAN PRIVATE COLLECTION
ROSE GARDEN
measurements
24 by 40 1/2 in.
alternate measurements
(61.0 by 102.9 cm)
signed Maria Oakey Dewing and dated 1901, l.l.
oil on canvas
Dr. Susan Hobbs, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, has commented that the Rose Garden is probably Maria Dewing's finest work, especially with its unique Stanford White designed frame.
PROVENANCE
Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Estate of Mrs. Whitelaw Reid (sold: American Art Association-Anderson Galleries, New York, May 2, 1934, lot 305)
Mrs. J.W.S. Reid (acquired at the above sale)
T.R. Baird, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1976 (sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 24, 2000, lot 18, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale
EXHIBITED
Boston, Massachusetts, Copley Society Exhibition, 1902, no. 78
Buffalo, New York, Pan-American Exhibition, 1901 (bronze medal)
New York, National Academy of Design, Ninety-eighth Annual Exhibition, 1923, no. 97
New York, Milch Galleries, 1923
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philbrook Art Center; New York, National Academy of Design, Painters of the Humble Truth: American Still Life Painting, September 1981-July 1982, no. 27, p. 147, illustrated p. 146, fig. 7.5 (detail)
LITERATURE
Arthur Edwin Bye, Pots and Pans or Studies in Still-Life Painting, Princeton, New Jersey, 1921, p. 199
Royal Cortissoz, New York Herald Tribune, March 25, 1923
Sadakichi Hartmann, A History of American Art, vol. 1, p. 249
Jennifer A. Martin, "The Rediscovery of Maria Oakey Dewing," The Feminist Art Journal, Summer 1976, p. 24
Jennifer A. Martin, "Royal Cortissoz and Maria Oakey Dewing's 'Rose Garden'," The Yale University Library Gazette 52, October 1977, pp. 84-88, illustrated
Jennifer A. Martin, "Portraits of Flowers: The Out-of-Door Still-Life Paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing," American Art Review, vol. IV, no. 3, December 1977, pp. 114, 115, 118, illustrated in color p. 53
NOTE
Maria Oakey Dewing was born in New York City in 1845. She grew up in a cultured environment and her interest in writing and painting was encouraged by her family. Though she initially wanted to become a writer, she decided at age seventeen to devote herself to painting. She received her early training at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in 1866 and later studied under John La Farge, whose influence is particularly evident in her beautiful plein air paintings of flowers. By 1875, Dewing had established herself as an artist and was one of the primary motivators behind the formation of the Art Student's League in New York. One of her classmates wrote of her role among her peers, "Maria Oakey...was looked upon as a distinguished student on account of her work being exhibited in the academy, and attracting so much attention for its broad, vigorous brushstroke, and rich, glowing color. She gave the impetus of her prestige to the new League" (as quoted in Martin, "Portraits of Flowers: The Out-of-Door Still-Life Paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing," American Art Review, December 1977, pp. 52, 55).
In 1881, Maria Oakey married Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and her primary subject matter began to shift away from figure painting, for which her husband was established as one of the finest talents, toward gardens and flowers, painted spontaneously out of doors. From 1885 to 1903, the Dewings spent their summers in Cornish, New Hampshire, where Thomas cultivated a garden and both husband and wife devoted themselves to their work. Jennifer Martin writes, " There, at the home she called 'Doveridge,' she executed many of the plein air flower paintings. The beauty of the New Hampshire landscape stimulated her creativity, just as it motivated a host of artists and writers who flocked to Cornish during those years.
"...In her Cornish garden she spent long hours studying the growth patterns, textures, and dispositions of the individual plants in order to nurture her 'garden thirsty soul.' She firmly believed that a painter of nature must bind himself to a 'long apprenticeship in the garden.' Yet, for her, a flower painting was not to be a 'mere reproduction' of reality but 'picturemaking'...
"Her composition, which is similar in all of the pictures...contributes importantly to the sense of animation. The use of the highest lights in the foreground...not only emphasizes the immediacy of the composition, but also contributes to a feeling of depth. The sensation of depth is also implied by the overlapping of forms as in Rose Garden, where roses peek through the mass of green foliage, and by the rather less defined areas in the upper center...In such a two-dimensional surface where forms move out toward the frame, the viewer has an immediate sense of intimacy with growing life and, concurrently, a sense of awe.
"...The originality of her paintings was noted by [Arthur E.] Bye who wrote: 'These remarkable works are absolutely unique. There is nothing like them in the field of flower painting,' and by Royal Cortissoz, authoritative critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who wrote after her death, 'The salient trait of Maria Oakey Dewing, was the strain of originality that characterized her deep feeling for beauty--There was no mistaking her quality, her accent...she knew how to interpret the soul of a flower--but her principal aim was to make it a work of art...save for John La Farge we have had no one who could work with flowers the magic that was hers" ("Portraits of Flowers: The Out-of-Door Still-Life Paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing," pp. 55, 114-16).
Though Dewing's work was largely unknown in this century until Martin began to write of her rediscovery in 1976, she was widely recognized and praised during her own lifetime. On the occasion of the exhibition of the present work at the National Academy of Design in 1923, Mr. Cortissoz wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "Mrs. Dewing's 'Rose Garden' leads the paintings of flowers through the beauty of design it possesses, its delicacy in the detachment of white and pink blossoms against a background of heavenly green, and its distinguished style. It is painted in a singularly reticent and haunting key" (Royal Cortissoz and Maria Oakey Dewing's 'Rose Garden,' The Yale University Library Gazette, October 1977, p. 87).
