Boats at Rest

Arts of the Americas

c. 1895

Arthur Wesley Dow
American, 1857–1922

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 Boats at Rest, 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.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Arthur Wesley Dow
Title: Boats at Rest
Place: Ipswich (Place depicted)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: c. 1895
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Signed, lower left: "Arthur W. Dow"
Dimensions: 66 × 91.4 cm (26 × 36 in.)
Credit Line: Through prior acquisition of the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
Reference Number: 1990.394
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/121377/manifest.json

The Art Institute of Chicago Annual Report 1990–1991 (Art Institute of Chicago, 1991): 16, fig. 10.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 289–91, no. 146.
Yang Zhigang, ed., Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, exh. cat. (Shanghai: Shanghai Book and Painting Press, 2018), cat. 13.

Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Arthur Wesley Dow and the American Arts and Crafts Movement, Oct. 8, 1999–Jan. 7, 2000.
Art Institute of Chicago, Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago, Nov. 7, 2009–Jan. 31, 2010, cat. 37.
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 13.

Private collection, New England, to 1990; Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1990; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.