Thomas Wilmer Dewing Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Thomas Wilmer Dewing was a lithographic apprentice as a boy but he preferred art and from 1876 to 1879, he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris with both Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre.

He returned to Boston first then moved to New York in 1880 where he met Maria Oakey Dewing, an accomplished painter herself with broad formal art training and family connections with the art world. 1881 was a good year, he married Maria Oakley and began teaching at the Art Students League in New York City. The following year he painted Morning, a composition of two women dressed in Renaissance gowns and a rudimentary Tonalist technique he would continue to perfect.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing is best known for his Tonalist paintings, a genre of American art that was rooted in English Aestheticism and developed by the second generation Hudson River School Artists. While most Tonalists painted landscapes, Dewing's preferred subject is the refined, aristocratic female figure situated in a moody and dreamlike surrounding. Dewing's delicately painted figures have a detachment from the viewer that keeps the spectator remote to the scene rather than a participant with vague unidentifiable locations.

He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1888. Dewing was a founding member of the Ten American Painters in 1898, a group of artists who withdrew from the Society of American Artists in 1897.

His works are in private collections and museums in the United States. At the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, a room is devoted to Dewing's canvases.

Art Movement: Tonalism.
Artists Influencing Thomas Dewing: Gustave Boulanger, Jules Lefebvre.
He Traveled To France.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.