Maria Oakey Dewing

Provenance:
Private Collection, Florida.

Lot Essay:
The present monumental still life is by Maria Oakey Dewing, an American painter best known for her depictions of flowers. Born in 1845 in New York City, she 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 of New York. Maria 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, Alexander F. Oakey, Maria also became an advocate of the Aesthetic movement, writing essays on dress and the domestic arts.

In April 1881, Maria wed the Boston-bred painter, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, with whom she had a daughter. She 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, New Hampshire, that Maria began painting works such as Irises at Dawn, 1899 (Hood Museum of Art) and Garden in May, 1895 (Smithsonian American Art Museum), which present close-up, cropped views of the 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.

When returning to New York City from summers at the family country home, Maria would turn her painterly attention to depictions of lush flower arrangements in beautiful vases. Still Life with Irises, Poppies, and Mignonettes in a Blue Vase perfectly encapsulates the artist’s affinity for floral subject matter. Set in an unusually shaped canvas, the narrow composition focuses the attention upon the overflowing blue vessel. With its turquoise glaze, the vase that holds the arrangement may very well be one of the Aesthetic movement objects championed by Maria and her brother. Within it, tall, stately irises rise to create an overall structure, with the round blossoms of the poppies and luxuriant mignonettes underneath creating a soft counterpoint. Brushy, almost transparent strokes of paint describe the petals, and along many of the petal edges, the artist has added small highlights of white, pink, or yellow, which make them appear to glow against the dark background. The leaves themselves are a marvel, executed with a thicker paint application in a multitude of greens ranging from vibrant emerald to rich teal. The effect overall is one of beauty for its own sake, the central tenant of the Aesthetic movement. As Maria herself stated, “The flower offers a removed beauty that exists only for beauty, more abstract than it can be in a human being, even more exquisite. One may begin with the human figure at the logical and realistic, but in painting the flower one must even begin at the exquisite and distinguished.” (Maria Oakey Dewing, “Flower Painters and What the Flower Offers to Art, Art and Progress, vol. 6, June 1915, no. 8, p. 255) The present painting is a powerful testament to the artist’s mastery of both her subject and her brush.