Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851–1938) may be the last important nineteenth-century American painter to receive proper recognition in the twentieth. Although Dewing died less than half a century ago, his once commanding reputation had predeceased the man himself by a couple of decades. He has had his isolated admirers since then, to be sure, but by and large even the public that has taken a keen interest in the minor contemporaries of Whistler, Sargent, and Eakins has scarcely been aware of Dewing’s work. As recently as the 1960s, some of our museums were even selling Dewing paintings out of their own collections.

The long period during which the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington was closed for repairs was yet another obstacle to anything like a Dewing revival, for it is only at the Freer that Dewing can be seen at full strength. When the Freer Gallery reopened in the spring of 1993, the museum’s Dewing room proved to be a sensation to a new generation of museumgoers that hardly knew the artist’s name.

The exhibition that Susan A. Hobbs and Barbara Dayer Gallati have now organized at the Brooklyn Museum under the title, “The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured,” seems, however, to be the first museum retrospective to be devoted to the artist in this century. It cannot be a complete retrospective, of course, without the Freer paintings, and the Freer does not lend. But this is a splendid exhibition, all the same, and it affords an excellent introduction to Dewing’s art.

Dewing had certain affinities with Whistler, even to the extent of giving certain figure paintings titles such as Harmony in Rose and Gray and Orange and Rose, and he was also strongly drawn to the element of enigmatic anecdote in Vermeer—perhaps the only American painter of his time to have such a strong interest in Vermeer. Yet in his paintings Dewing is finally quite unlike Whistler—he is less of a realist than Whistler, for one thing. (He has a more delicate, silkier touch, too; the surface of a Dewing painting has a kind of luminous sheen that Whistler could never equal.) Dewing doesn’t much resemble Vermeer, either, for the anecdotal element in Dewing is fairly innocuous. Nor is it quite enough to say of Dewing—as almost everyone writing about Dewing does—that he was a votary of the Aesthetic Movement. A devoted aesthete Dewing surely was, but the particular spirit of aestheticism that he brought to his best paintings—The White Birch (1896–99), say, or The Hermit Thrush (1893)—tends so radically to dematerialize the subject matter of his art that its subjects all but disappear into a pure chromatic mist.

The paradox in Dewing’s art is that his adored principal subject was the clothed female figure, yet the aesthetic imperative that governs these paintings of women gives priority to the pictorial space, whether landscape or interior, which the female figures occupy. In The White Birch, for example, the two female figures are almost lost to the eye—lost in the brilliant green haze that dominates the picture’s surface with a power that is more abstract than representational. The Hermit Thrush goes pretty far in that direction, too—in the direction of a virtually abstract light-filled landscape space devoid of topographical articulation or human drama.

Elsewhere in Dewing’s oeuvre, it is sometimes a hinted-at human drama that seems to be the point of departure for a painting, yet in the execution of the picture the anecdote is quickly stripped of interest in favor of the painterly execution. This aesthetic bias, as it may be called, is felt even in a good many of Dewing’s portraits of women, which, with rare exceptions—the Portrait of Frances Houston (c. 1880) is one of them—show remarkably little interest in the subjects’ character. Women in Dewing’s pictures tend to be painted as aesthetic objects—not sex objects, as we now use that term, but aesthetic objects, which is something else (though in life Dewing seems to have had quite a healthy interest in the opposite sex).

This subordination of the female figure to a more general aesthetic imperative in Dewing’s painting has inevitably become a source of feminist complaint in recent years, and it is doubtless for this reason that in the book-length catalogue that accompanies the current exhibition there is such a determined effort to discover “elements of discontent” and “almost imperceptible tensions” in Dewing’s paintings—even, alas, “images [that] suggest the discords of his age.” For myself, attempting to turn Dewing into a kind of Existentialist of 1890s Aestheticism looks like a foolhardy pursuit. Dewing was a painter of aesthetic fantasy, and as he went to a great deal of artistic labor to keep even a hint of “the discords of his age” from ever appearing in his pictures, I think it wrong for scholars to attempt to put into his art what he so definitively left out.

Be all that as it may, “The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing” is a welcome event. What it “reconfigures,” however, isn’t so much the idea of beauty as it is the aesthetic history of late nineteenth-century American painting.

Following its installation at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will travel to the National Museum of American Art in Washington (July 19–October 24, 1996) and the Detroit Institute of Arts (November 9, 1996–January 19, 1997). A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Susan A. Hobbs and Barbara Dayer Gallati, has been published by the Brooklyn Museum in association with the Smithsonian Institution Press (224 pages, $65; $29.95 paper).