The Long Road – Argilla Road, Ipswich
ca. 1898–1912
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
Color woodcut
Dimensions
image: 4 1/4 x 7 1/16 in. (10.8 x 17.9 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Mrs. W. L. Putnam, 1942
Accession Number
42.54.4
Tags
About this artwork
Arthur Wesley Dow's color woodcut "The Long Road" demonstrates the artist-educator's synthesis of Japanese aesthetic principles with American landscape subjects. Created between 1898 and 1912, this print depicts Argilla Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a locale Dow returned to repeatedly throughout his career. Dow studied Japanese prints intensively and adopted their emphasis on flat color areas, simplified forms, and careful composition over Western illusionistic techniques. His teaching at Prat...
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow's *The Long Road – Argilla, Ipswich* (ca. 1898–1912) captures the quiet beauty of a Massachusetts landscape through the lens of Japanese printmaking. This color woodcut, measuring just 4¼ × 7⅛ inches, depicts the winding Argilla Road in Ipswich—a Dow revisited often. As an artist-educator, immersed himself in ukiyo-e prints, their flat color areas, simplified forms, and harmonious compositions with everyday American scenes, moving away from Western realism. In this intimate print, Dow exemplifies his revolutionary theories from his 1899 book *Composition*, which reshaped art...
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...