Maria Oakey Dewing

Maria Oakey Dewing and her husband, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, spent the summers from 1885 to 1905 at an artists' colony in Cornish, New Hampshire. There they cultivated the large garden that Maria studied and painted. In Garden in May [SAAM, 1929.6.26] the viewer has a "worm's-eye view" of a bed of carnations and roses. Dewing places the viewer among the living stems and blossoms that she knew so well. She has cropped a section from the larger bed for intense study, as if she had held a frame in front of the garden and painted only what fit in the rectangle.

As a young woman, Dewing published articles and books on etiquette and housekeeping. In later years she wrote about painting for the national magazine Art and Progress. Having studied at both the Cooper Union School of Design for Women and the National Academy of Design, she took her art seriously, as did critics.

Despite the success, her career held disappointment. As the wife of one of the most prominent figure painters of the day, she felt unable to compete with her husband, substituting her flower painting for the figure compositions she had exhibited in her student days. At the end of her life, Dewing expressed doubt in her accomplishments and regret for what she had given up: "I have hardly touched any achievement," she wrote in a letter the year she died. "I dreamed of groups and figures in big landscapes and I still see them."

Elizabeth Chew Women Artists (brochure, Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)