The Big Sky, or Marshes
ca. 1912
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
Color woodcut
Dimensions
Image: 2 3/16 × 3 13/16 in. (5.5 × 9.7 cm) Sheet: 3 1/16 × 4 1/4 in. (7.7 × 10.8 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts, 2016
Accession Number
2016.214
Tags
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow's *The Big Sky, orhes* (ca. 1912) is a delicate color woodcut capturing the expansive drama of a marshland under a vast sky. This intimate print, measuring just over 2 by 3 inches, invites close contemplation, its subtle hues of blue, green, and gold evoking the serene beauty of the American landscape. Dow, influential American artist and educator (1857–1922), drew inspiration from Japanese ukiyo-e prints, blending Eastern composition principles with Western naturalism during the early 20th century's Arts and Crafts movement. The medium of color woodcut is particularly signi...
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...