Boats at Rest

1895·Oil on canvas·66 × 91.4 cm (26 × 36 in.)

<p>In 1891 Arthur Wesley Dow began to engage seriously with the formal elements of Japanese art in his prints and oil paintings. In works such as <em>Boats at Rest</em>, he depicted locales around his native Ipswich, Massachusetts, using the radical cropping, elevated perspective, and flattened pictorial space characteristic of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock) prints. His palette of bold colors, however, is more akin to the work of French Post-Impressionist artists such as Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. Dow’s Japanese-inspired theories of composition, which he outlined both in his publications and in the classes he taught at the Ipswich Summer School of Art and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, were immensely influential to artists and designers working in both two and three dimensions.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1895
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 66 × 91.4 cm (26 × 36 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Arthur Wesley Dow

Artist

Arthur Wesley Dow

Painting

Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, and influential art educator who synthesized Japanese compositional principles with Western painting traditions. Working primarily in oil, watercolor, and woodblock print, he developed a distinctive approach to landscape that emphasized flattened picture planes, bold linear rhythms, and restrained color palettes. His teaching at Pratt Institute and Teachers College, Columbia University shaped early twentieth-century American art pedagogy, introducing generations of students to non-Western formal systems. Dow's own work remains rooted in the visual vocabulary of the natural world, particularly the marshlands and coastal forms of New England.

Ipswich, MA, USA

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