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