Interpretive Resource

Arthur Wesley Dow studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1884 to 1889, spending the summers painting in Pont Aven. Although Paul Gauguin worked in the immediate area for some of that time, there is scant evidence that the two artists ever met. Boats at Rest, painted after Dow’s return to Ipswich, Massachusetts, reveals the heightened sensitivity he had acquired in Brittany to local landscape, but its dynamic palette marks a significant shift from the atmospheric and tonal quality of the plein-air technique he had practiced in France. While the strong hues—almost jarring in their vibrant contrasts—suggest Gauguin’s free exploration of color, they derive from another influence: the Japanese prints that Dow, like many artists of his time, came to appreciate.

Dow pursued his interest in Japanese art by studying the notable collection of ukiyo-e (the floating world) prints in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; his instinctive understanding of these works prompted curator Ernest Fenollosa to hire him as his assistant. As Dow wrote to his fiancée, "One evening with Hokusai gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures." Three basic elements that Dow discerned in the Japanese aesthetic—line, color, and notan (harmony)—provided the core of the artistic theory he articulated in Composition, an instruction manual he published in 1899. The clear tones, daring diagonals, and boldly flattened forms used in Boats at Rest demonstrate Dow’s application of Japanese artistic principles to his own work. In his career as a teacher, Dow imparted these elements to a wide range of students, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber, thus influencing the course of American modernism.