Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Born in Boston in 1851, Thomas Wilmer Dewing was raised with relatively little money and formal education. At a young age, he displayed a remarkable talent and passion for drawing, and was subsequently apprenticed to the master lithographer Dominique Fabronius. Dewing’s first formal artistic education took place nearly a decade later, when in 1876 he secured enough money for a year’s sojourn in Paris to study at the Académie Julian. After a three-year stint teaching at the newly created Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Dewing moved to New York City, where he met and married the accomplished still-life and portrait painter Maria Richards Oakley. The union with Oakley provided him with access to many of the foremost critics and artists of the day; however, despite his success in the late nineteenth century, Dewing felt lonely and insecure in New York’s art world as a result of his humble background. Art historians have suggested that the artist’s predominant interest in themes of isolation result from his self-perceived status as an outsider.

Although he very much stressed his uniqueness and independence vis-à-vis artistic movements, Dewing came to be associated with the Ten, a group of primarily Impressionist artists who resigned from the Society of American Artists in 1897 as a protest against the limited opportunities for American artists to exhibit their work. This association inextricably linked Dewing to the American Impressionists even though he employed disparate stylistic elements, such as the dark, atmospheric veil of Tonalism. Combining this sensibility with certain tenets of Impressionism, like broken brushwork and the juxtaposition of unblended colors, Dewing formed his own unique style. The work Green and Gold is an excellent example of the artist’s incorporation of various artistic styles in his own exploration of subtle form and color variations.

Seated in a delicate armchair, the solitary figure in Green and Gold is practically enveloped by the rhythmic folds of her sumptuous gown. Featuring a fitted bodice, puffy sleeves and a full skirt with cascading layers edged in white lace, the lady’s dress is fashioned out of diaphanous material that reflects brilliant shades of green, blue and gold. Her brunette hair is swept up in a sophisticated coiffure, revealing the sensuous line of her slender neck. Clearly one of his primary interests, Dewing’s exquisite rendition of the figure’s wardrobe is similar to James McNeill Whistler’s costume sketches and discloses a belief in the importance of aesthetic concerns.

While the lady’s elegant attire and flawless hairdo indicate that she is attending a social gathering, her casual posture reveals that she has allowed herself to be caught up in a private moment of internal reverie. Her delicate, beautifully rendered hand moves to cup her chin as she gazes dreamily to the left, appearing remote from the assumed activity of the scene. The recession of her visage into the shadows serves as a metaphor for the disassociation of her mind and its fantasies from external reality.

The sparse composition of the drawing is juxtaposed to the artist’s effervescent pencil work. Using spontaneous and expressive strokes, Dewing endows the gentlewoman with a great sense of luminosity and vitality. An up-close examination of the drawing’s surface reveals a rich range of understated hues, which combine visually to create a harmonious and romantic picture. This effect results from Dewing’s unique use of the pastel medium. The artist consistently used brown paper and light colored chalk so that his modeled figures would appear to emerge from the shadows into the light. In contrast to his early works, which were completed in a meticulous naturalism and anatomical exactitude, Dewing’s later drawings like Green and Gold are rendered in a less deliberated, more free-flowing style that gives greater emphasis to capturing an elusive, ethereal moment.

Dewing first employed pastel on paper in the 1890s, most likely after seeing Whistler’s pastel exhibition at the Wunderlich Gallery in New York. Initially creating them for individual clients, Dewing subsequently began to make slightly larger drawings for exhibition, which prompted him in 1909 to introduce a system of inventory numbers. Green and Gold, originally labeled by the artist as pastel no.130, was sent in 1923 to the Macbeth Gallery, which then loaned the work to the Corcoran Gallery of Art for a show entitled Special Exhibition of Drawings in Pastel and Silverpoint by Thomas W. Dewing. When the drawing returned from the exhibition, the artist continued to work on it. Once finished in 1925, Dewing changed the inventory number in the lower right on the work from no. 130 to no. 160.