Thomas Dewing Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Thomas Dewing became a noted figure painter of idealized women, rendered simply with limited palette in a style associated with Impressionism and Tonalism. Unlike most tonalists who painted landscapes, he adopted that style to figure work, in which one color was dominant and reflective and infused the atmosphere as a whole. He was also a muralist, and one of his major pieces is installed, since 1900, at the Detroit Savings Bank and is titled "Commerce and Agriculture Bringing Wealth to Detroit." A large bristling man, known for his sarcasm, quarrelsome, and bitter temperament, he created work that was popular in the late 19th century but declined after the Armory Show of 1913 when modernism was introduced to the United States. He studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and worked briefly as a lithographer. In Albany, New York, he worked as a chalk portraitist and then studied figure painting at the Academie Julian in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre from 1876 to 1879. He married the artist Maria Oakley, a talented painter of figures and flowers, and she often collaborated with him by filling in sparse landscapes behind his figures or flowers. Between 1885 and 1902, he spent his summers in Cornish, New Hampshire, a well known art colony. In 1887, he was elected to the National Academy in New York, and he became a teacher there. In 1889, he won a silver medal at the Paris Exposition. In 1898, he was a founder of the Ten American Painters that included Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, J Alden Weir, and rebelled against the strictures of the Academy. The first comprehensive exhibition of his work was held at The Brooklyn Museum in New York in spring and early summer, 1996.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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