Arthur Wesley Dow

toned, titled in pencil on the reverse, 1912

The estate of the photographer

By descent to George and Barbara D. Wright, the photographer’s grand-niece

To the present owner

This early, warm-toned photograph is on heavy double-weight paper with a nearly matte surface. It is essentially in very good to excellent condition. Pin-point-sized dark deposits and occasional original retouching are visible overall. Four small white specs in the upper right portion of the image are due to dust or imperfections on the negative and do not appear to be features of the present print. This print has margins measuring approximately 3/4-inches. Faint scattered foxing in the margins and on the reverse of the print does not appear to affect the image. The reverse of the print is appropriately age-darkened.
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The painter and print-maker Arthur Wesley Dow was also an accomplished photographer whose extant photographs are scarce.  Initially a student of academic painting, Dow encountered Ernest Fenollosa at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the early 1890s, and from that time on began to incorporate an Asian aesthetic into his work.   His spare lines and abstracted shapes in a variety of media became an important precursor to the Modernist movement.  Among his many protégés were Alvin Langdon Coburn and Georgia O’Keeffe.  

A trip to the American West in 1911 and 1912 produced a series of photographs that Dow enlarged for exhibition, such as the ones offered here.  These photographs descended from the artist’s estate to George and Barbara D. Wright, the photographer’s grand-niece, and thence to the present owner.  Their history is discussed in James Enyeart’s Harmony of Reflected Light: The Photographs of Arthur Wesley Dow (Santa Fe, 2001), pp. 163-64.

Dow’s interest in the Chinese fishing village at Monterey may have been inspired by houses built along the water’s edge in his native Ipswich and by fishing huts he would have seen on trips to the Orient in the early 1900s.  The Chinese shanties disappeared from the Monterey coastline soon after Dow photographed there, giving way to the more industrial, and famous, Cannery Row.