Arthur W. Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) was an American painter, printmaker and teacher of art. Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, he studied in Paris and then worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Ernest Fenollosa, whose knowledge of Japanese art transformed his ideas. Rejecting the copying of nature as the basis of training, he taught composition through line, notan, or dark and light, and color. His textbook Composition (1899) and his teaching at Pratt Institute and at Teachers College, Columbia University, shaped American art education for decades. His students included Georgia O'Keeffe. He was known for his color woodcuts of the Ipswich landscape.