Thomas Wilmer Dewing is best known for his tonalist paintings of women, often in allegorical contexts. “The recurring theme in Thomas Dewing’s art,” wrote Lloyd Goodrich in 1963, “is womankind. His ethereal creatures . . . are exquisite sonnets to femininity” [as quoted by Mitsutoshi Oba in Eclectic Symbolism: The Interplay of Japonisme and Classicism in the Folding Screens by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1896-1900 (2004), p. 34]. His work grew from a British aestheticist idiom to a mature style in a tonalist manner. His work was coveted in the late nineteenth century for its decorative quality, holding a wall as well as expressing an almost elemental beauty and refinement.

Dewing’s artistic training centered, like many Boston-area painters of the day, around his study in Europe. In the late 1870s, Dewing enrolled at the Academie Julian, practicing life study with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Dewing seems to have disliked his time there, but he returned to America in 1878 well-armed: with friendships with peers William Merritt Chase and William Sartain; with a well-polished drawing practice; and with a newfound love of Velazquez, among other Old Masters. These attributes set the stage for Dewing’s young mature style, with female figures in dramatic poses. When Dewing exhibited his work that year at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, R. Swain Gifford remarked, “There is a man by the name of Dewing in Boston that does charming figure subjects, a new man and little known but I believe him to be a remarkably fine painter” [Ibid., p. 16]. By 1880, Dewing left Boston for New York. Recognizing the metropolis as the cultural center of the nation, he once remarked to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Why Gussie, if you’re not in New York, you’re camping out” [Ibid., p. 24]. By the following year, he had been elected to the Society of American Artists and taken a teaching position at the Art Students League. The latter accolade was critical to his entry into New York art circles, but equally important to Dewing as it introduced him to his future wife, Maria Oakey. Oakey was herself a painter of some esteem, and they were wed in April of 1881. The couple soon moved into the Studio Building on Washington Square, where Oakey’s poetry co-mingled with Dewing’s interest in music and theater, all of which found expression in each of their painting practices. Royal Cortissoz, Dewing’s “faithful friend of more than four decades” [Oba (2004), p. 10] reminisced: “I used to be charmed by the harp on the door which gave forth delicate music as the door opened and shut…That is what characterized his art, an exquisite music” [as quoted in Hobbs, 1981, p. 27].

In 1888, Dewing’s technique and subject matter underwent a small but significant shift. Susan Hobbs notes that he “stopped producing imaginative subjects,” as anything not observed in his paintings dissolved into a dream-like mist. This dissolution was afforded by the change in his technique, including the adoption of loose brushwork and a tonalist palette approach. In 1890, Dewing met the Detroit collector Charles Lang Freer. Freer’s fortune was built on railroad-car fabrication, and a love of fine art had developed over a decade of collecting prints and, increasingly, artifacts of east Asia. His refined personality contrasted starkly with Dewing’s bombastic nature. By the 1890s, Freer had the wealth to acquire major pictures and the newly-constructed home to fill with them. He “plunged into collecting with a quiet desperation,” his private curator recalled [as quoted by Susan Hobbs in The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured (1996), p. 18]. Dewing’s fiery personality, as well as his commitment to painting women, which Freer initially abjured, were apparently no barrier to their immediate, long-lasting, and friendly patronage relationship. Dewing, for his part, was profoundly grateful to meet “someone in the world so faithful to me and my art” [as quoted in http://www.asia.si.edu/explore/american/dewing.asp]. Dewing personally advised Freer in the decoration of Freer’s home, and, when the painter later fell on hard times, was buffeted by his employ as a buying agent for Japanese prints and objets d’art as well as prints by James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

Freer also supported Dewing financially in a European trip in 1894. Freer would leave on his own journey – ultimately to east Asia – but the two rendezvoused in Paris in November, where they visited the studio of James Abbott McNeil Whistler. The visit made an impression on all three men: Freer redoubled his interest in Whistler’s work, and later Whistler wrote to Freer, “I like Dewing too very much . . . yesterday afternoon is not readily forgotten in the studio!” [as quoted in Oba (2004), p. 207]. Dewing, for his part, observed in Whistler’s studio the only folding screen Whistler was to create: Blue and Silver: Screen with Old Battersea Bridge (1871-1872, distemper and gold paint on brown paper laid on canvas stretched on back of silk, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow). Whistler’s love of Japanese style was well-known to both of his visitors, but Oba observes that Whistler, by the 1890s, was combining japonisme with Symbolism, a new development in Whistler’s thinking. In 1893, Whistler illustrated the frontispiece of an edition of poems by his friend, the Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1885, he delivered what became known as the “Ten O’Clock Lecture” at Prince’s Hall in London, concluding with these remarks:

The story of the beautiful is already complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon – and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai—at the Foot of Fujiyama [as quoted by Oba (2004), p. 209].

Whistler’s line of aesthetic reasoning explicitly connected Western classical ideals with eastern expressions in what Oba has termed “Greco-Japonisme.” The joining of this aesthetic fusion with Symbolist devices and tonalist style is perhaps not fully manifest in Whistler’s own work, but there may be few more clear expressions of it than in the allegorical “Season” paintings by Thomas Wilmer Dewing in the years near his meeting with Whistler.

Dewing was given to relating his work to music: following Whistler, he sometimes used musical terms to associate his compositions with those of the chamber ensemble; he also frequently depicted women with musical instruments. Indeed, so strong was the association between Dewing’s visual art and music that Steinway & Sons commissioned Dewing to decorate the top of a piano for the White House in 1904 [Oba (2004), p. 64].

The present work is a masterful example of all of these elements: an allegory of springtime, it depicts a pair of women in “Greco-Japonisme” manner, one embodying dance while the other evokes music. They seem to float in a nebulous green space, which is handled with the silvery quality of Tonalism worthy of Whistler. The confluence of these subtle strands of influence, guided by the hand of a master craftsman, makes the present work an important and stunningly beautiful example.