Maria Oakey Dewing
Maria Oakey Dewing
1845 - 1927
American painter. She began her career as a figure painter, but was best known for her images of growing flowers. Maria Oakey Dewing was as well trained as most of her male peers and one of the few women of her generation to successfully maintain a lifetime career as an artist. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women (1868–71) then enrolled at the National Academy of Design but, in 1875, left with a group of fellow students to form the Art Students League. She took private lessons with JOHN LA FARGE and in 1876 she studied briefly in Paris with THOMAS COUTURE. After her return, she resumed her position in New York art circles, becoming a regular exhibitor at the National Academy as well as the newly formed SOCIETY OF AMERICAN ARTISTS. Along with her architect brother she also became an advocate of the AESTHETIC MOVEMENT, writing essays on dress and the domestic arts.
Maria Oakey and the Boston-bred painter, THOMAS WILMER DEWING, married in April 1881; their daughter was born four years later. While continuing her own work, Maria helped introduce her husband to the New York art world and collaborated with him by providing the foliage backgrounds on several paintings. It was at their summer home in the artists’ colony at Cornish, NH, that Maria began painting works such as Irises at Dawn (1899; Hanover, NH, Dartmouth Coll., Hood Mus. A.) and Garden in May (1895; Washington, DC, Smithsonian Amer. A. Mus.), which present close-up, cropped views of the living flowers in their garden. She often worked en plein air and her distinctive view of subtly defined and delicately colored blossoms against a painterly screen of foliage established her as one of the leading flower painters in an age enthralled by gardens.
In 1901, Dewing won a Bronze Medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, and in 1907 she mounted a solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, an unusual honor for a woman at that time. She died in 1927 at the age of 82 in her New York studio. [Deborah F. Pokinski. "Dewing, Maria Oakey." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2090154.]
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