Nabby's Point
ca. 1913
Medium
Color woodcut; trial proof on cream paper
Dimensions
Image: 2 15/16 × 3 7/8 in. (7.5 × 9.8 cm) Sheet: 3 1/16 × 4 13/16 in. (7.8 × 12.2 cm)
Classification
Woodcut, print
Culture
American
Department
The American Wing
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of the Dowd-Gallogly Family and Allan E. Dowd, 2016
Accession Number
2016.406.8
Tags
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow’s “Nabby’s Point” (ca. 1913) captures a tranquil American landscape in a delicate color woodcut printed on cream paper. Measuring just under four inches across, the intimate scale invites close looking, revealing layered hues and simplified forms that evoke the quiet shoreline of coastal Massachusetts. As a trial proof, the print offers a rare glimpse into Dow’s working process, showing how he experimented with color blocks to achieve luminous, harmonious effects. Dow, a leading figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement, drew deeply from Japanese ukiyo-e prints. 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...