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Summer
Thomas Wilmer Dewing (born Boston, MA 1851-died New York City 1938)
ca. 1890
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 42 1/8 x 54 1/4 in. (107.0 x 137.8 cm.)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s paintings of elegant women evoked an exclusive world of beauty and refined taste. From 1885 until 1905, Dewing was a key figure in the artist colony at Cornish, New Hampshire, which included Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Abbott Thayer. They agreed that art and beauty offered a “higher life” for an age in which Darwin’s theories challenged Christian beliefs and urban industrialization disrupted life’s natural rhythms. Summer shows women in evening gowns theatrically posed in nature and conveys the “Cornishite’s” attitude that life should be a chain of beautiful moments. Every summer, Dewing orchestrated twilight picnics and participated in theatrical performances with fellow artists and writers in the woods of Cornish. (Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Nineteenth-century America, 1996)
