Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow painted landscapes built from flat shapes, simple outlines and harmonies of colour, a style shaped by Japanese woodblock prints. His marshes, rivers and coastal views around Ipswich, Massachusetts, feel calm and designed, like a print in oil.

He was born in Ipswich in 1857, studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and painted in Brittany at Pont-Aven. In Boston he met Ernest Fenollosa, curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, and worked as his assistant. That experience shaped his book Composition, published in 1899, which taught art through line, mass and colour rather than copying. He taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia University Teachers College, and his students included Georgia O’Keeffe.

A Bright Sky with a Breeze and A June Morning show his simple, rhythmic compositions. He died in New York in 1922.