Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich on April 6,1857 to David Francis and Mary Patch (Annable) Dow, who were at time living in the First Period Matthew Perkins house on East Street. When he was four years old, his father bought land on Spring St. and constructed a small house for the family. His cousin, Charles H. Dow, died in the Civil War at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in June, 1864. His father David held various jobs over the years–carpenter, repairman, farmer, grave-digger and undertaker. He kept a meticulous diary in which he noted the weather and the arrival of birds in the spring until died after falling off a scaffold at the age of 71 in 1891.

Arthur Wesley Dow’s education began at Lucy A. Perkin’s Ipswich grammar school classes. Around 1870 he was enrolled at the Putnam Free School in Newburyport. He hoped to enter Amherst College, but with no prospects for raising the tuition, he began teaching elementary children in the one room school at Linebrook Parish. He continued private studies under the guidance of Rev. John P. Cowles, co-director of the Ipswich Female Seminary.

In 1875 Dow was retained by the Ipswich Historical Society to write autobiographical sketches and poems. These writings show an early fascination with the town’s eccentric characters and their ancient houses. Dow had celebrated his 21st birthday when he expanded his interests to sketching and painting the Ipswich landscape, houses and the Ipswich River. A few of the sketches are in the possession of the Ipswich Museum.

Reverend Augustine Caldwell, a professional antiquarian, provided yet another outlet for Dow’s literary and artistic ambitions. In 1879 Caldwell began assembling the genealogical papers of Abraham Hammatt for publication. His sister Lydia Caldwell, the Ipswich librarian arranged for Caldwell and Dow to meet, and they formed a working relationship. The Antiquarian Papers were printed from October 1879 to July 1884 as a serial publication. introduced his protégé to typesetting, editing, proofreading, and printing. Dow’s illustrations were pen-and-ink drawings, along with some woodblock printing and lithography.

In 1880, Augustine Caldwell introduced Dow to influential patrons, and within a year he was selling paintings and entering his works in exhibitions. Dow enrolled in the studio classes of Boston artist James M. Stone and began instructing art classes in Essex County, including Ipswich. With the money he saved, Dow departed for Paris in October of 1884 studying at the Académie Julian, under the supervision of the academic artists Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, and developed the style which began his illustrious career. He became a lifelong friend of Henry Rodman Kenyon, who studied with him in Paris at the Académie Julian. During the summer, Dow and his wife ran the Ipswich Summer School of Art from the historic “Howard house” on Turkey Shore Road. Arthur Wesley.

Dow was a contemporary of early Ipswich photographer George Dexter, with whom he formed a friendship, and whose whose work is sometimes erroneously attributed to Dow. He formed a friendship with a neighbor, the fledgling young writer and artist Everett Stanley Hubbard, with whom he published “By Salt Marshes, Pictures and Poems of Olde Ipswich.”

In 1899 Dow created a teaching manual entitled Composition: Understanding Line, Notation and Color. In this very popular book he combines the best of Eastern and Western ideas, exploring the creation of images based on relations between lines, colors, and light patterns. Dow served as the assistant curator of Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then was the director of the Fine Arts Department at the Teachers’ College at Columbia University in New York City until his death in 1922.

Eighteen acres of his land was land was bequeathed to the town to become Dow Park on upper Spring Street, and his home went to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now called “Historic New England” upon his death in 1922.

The Ipswich Museum owns the largest single collection of works by Arthur Wesley Dow, including oil paintings, watercolors, photographs, ink wash drawings, wood block prints, and plaster casts.

In 1899, Dow produced an album of 41 photographs entitled “Ipswich Days” and later published “By Salt Marshes: Pictures & Poems of Old Ipswich.”

“Ipswich Days” analyzes this album and its significance in the artist’s career. Each of the images, depicting Ipswich’s clam shanties, marshes, farms, people, trees, flowers, and boats alike, is handsomely reproduced and reflects the beauty that Dow saw and uniquely interpreted in this quintessentially New England town.Source material for this article is from “The Education of the New England Artist: The Early Years of Arthur Wesley Dow by Frederick C. Moffatt, Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. 112, October 1976.

Cyanotypes of Ipswich by Arthur Wesley Dow

An extensive collection of cyanotypes was created by Arthur Wesley Dow from his own glass plate negatives and those of George Dexter, which are now in the possession of the Ipswich Town Historian. The cyanotype scans below are courtesy of David Thayer, which he scanned in 1995 from the collection of Anne Parker Wigglesworthwhich before some of them were given to the MFA.

Ink prints

In the ink sketch, “The Long Road: Argilla Road, Ipswich” he depicts a gravel road with a walking path running parallel as it may have been before the automotive age. Dow created several woodcut prints of the scene that I found in “Along Ipswich River: The Color Woodcuts of Arthur Wesley Dow depicting the walking trail converging with the road in the distance.

Photos below are from the following sources:

• Pinterest
• Amazon.com
• Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color
• Harmony of Reflected Light: The Photographs of Arthur Wesley Dow
• Ipswich Days: Arthur Wesley Dow and His Hometown (Addison Gallery of American Art)
• Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
• Along Ipswich River: The color woodcuts of Arthur Wesley Dow
• By salt marshes: pictures and poems of old Ipswich
• Ipswich Days: Arthur Wesley Dow and His Hometown (Addison Gallery of American Art)