Lily
Medium
Color woodcut; first proof
Dimensions
Image: 8 3/4 × 2 5/16 in. (22.2 × 5.9 cm) Sheet: 10 7/16 × 3 13/16 in. (26.5 × 9.7 cm)
Classification
Woodcut, print
Culture
American
Department
The American Wing
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Morse Family Foundation Fund, 2016
Accession Number
2016.428
Tags
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow's *Lily* (1898) is a delicate color woodcut, capturing the elegant form of a single lily in an intimate vertical composition. Measuring just 8 3/4 × 2 5/16 inches, this first proof from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing showcases Dow's mastery of printmaking, with its subtle layering of colors achieved through multiple woodblocks—a technique inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e masters. Dow, a pioneering American artist and educator, bridged Eastern and Western aesthetics during the height of Japonisme in the late 19th century. Influenced by his travels to Japan, he cha...
About the Artist
Arthur Wesley Dow · 1857–1922
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) was an American artist, printmaker, and educator whose ideas about composition and design exerted an outsized influence on American modernism, reaching well beyond anything his own paintings and prints might have achieved on their own. Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, he studied in Boston and then in Paris at the Académie Julian, where he absorbed the academic training...