Maria Oakey Dewing

Maria Oakey Dewing reading, between 1875 and 1885?

Fratelli Vianelli (Firm). Dewing family papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Quick Facts

Significance:

painter, member of the Cornish Colony

Place of Birth:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

October 27, 1845

Place of Death:

New York, NY

Date of Death:

December 13, 1927

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, MA

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetary

“Let not the student think that flower painting is the business of the amateur,” exclaimed Maria Oakey Dewing in 1905.¹ Oakey was an early leader in a movement emphasizing beauty, or Aesthetics, above all else. This “garden-thirsty soul” went on to create immersive paintings that embraced a new sense of modernism.

Maria Oakey Dewing was the fifth of ten children from an upper-class family in New York City. At the age of 17, she decided to become a painter and eventually enrolled in Cooper Union’s School of Design. Oakey Dewing continued her studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts from 1871 to 1875 where she learned from acclaimed painter John la Farge.

By 1880, she was gaining acclaim as a talented portrait painter and received recognition for her skill often unrecognized in female artists at the time. During this period, she met Thomas Dewing as he was seeking to establish himself as an artist. Their shared experience of being portrait painters brought them together, eventually leading to their marriage in 1881. Despite her initially success, Oakey Dewing largely retreated from a profession in the arts and assumed more domestic duties after their marriage.

In 1885, the two followed their friend, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to summer in Cornish, New Hampshire and became early members of the Cornish Art Colony. For twenty years, they were leaders in this informal community of artists and art-enthusiasts of all types. During this period, Maria and Thomas regularly collaborated on the same works of art with Thomas capturing features of a person and Maria painting floral elements. They both signed the work, Hymen, but it is believed Maria Oakey Dewing also contributed to other paintings credited to her husband.

Throughout her time in Cornish, Oakey Dewing found beauty in their elaborate gardens and worked to capture their essence through painting. "The flower offers a removed beauty that exists only for beauty, more abstract than it can be in a human being, even more exquisite," she wrote in 1905.² In 2021, the Smithsonian American Art Museum commissioned “A Garden-Thirsty Soul: A Comic about Maria Oakey Dewing” as part of their series, Draw to Art: Tales of Inspiring Women Artists.

Oakey Dewing applied her artistic perspective to domestic life by authoring From Attic to Cellar: A Book for Young Housekeepers (1879) and Beauty in the Household (1882). Her talents extended beyond painting into the decorative arts too. However, according to Oakey Dewing, when playwright Oscar Wilde asked, “Why don’t you go into decoration & wipe them all out?”, she responded by saying, “Because I must paint pictures or die”.³

¹"Flower Painters and What the Flower Offers to Art" by Maria Oakey Dewing in Art and Progress, Volume VI, Number 8, June 1915.
² "Flower Painters and What the Flower Offers to Art."
³ Maria Oakey Dewing, letter to Royal Cortissoz, February 20, 1921. Yale University Library.