Maria Oakey Dewing

Maria Richards Oakey was born in New York City, the fifth child of William Francis Oakey and Sally Sullivan Oakey, who had ten children together. William was an importer, and was also interested in the arts, Sally was a cultured woman and writer who came from a wealthy family from Boston. Her younger brother, Alexander F. Oakey, was an architect with, like his sister, an interest in textiles. He wrote The Art of Life and Life of Art in 1884. In 1881 Maria Oakey married Thomas Dewing, whose career was less well established. After that, she was disappointed in her career. As the wife of one of the most prominent figure painters of the day, she felt unable to compete with her husband. At the end of her life, Dewing, expressed doubt in her accomplishments and regret for what she had given up: “I have hardly touched any achievement”. She and her husband had a son who died while an infant, and a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1885. ==Education==

, Atlanta, Georgia She first attended the Cooper Union School of Design in 1866, studying there until 1870 during which time she shared an apartment with de Kay In 1875, Oakey and other students from the academy left to establish the now renowned Art Students League of New York. The same year her works were exhibited at a show organized in New York by La Farge and she studied with landscape artist William Morris Hunt and in 1876 with Thomas Couture. ==Career==

Art Maria and her husband spent the summers from 1885 to 1905 Dewing created embroidered applique pieces that were like tapestries in the early 1880s. and at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where she won bronze medals. In 1907 a solo exhibition of 22 of her flower and figure paintings was held at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She began making figure paintings again later in life. Her patrons during her career included Charles Lang Freer, Whitelaw Reid and John Gellatly. In her lifetime, her works were compared to French painters Antoine Vollon, Henri Fantin-Latour and John La Farge. Wistful that as a wife of a successful figure painter she had not realized her full potential, Dewing said in the later years of her career, "I have hardly touched any achievement... I dreamed of groups and figures in big landscapes and I still see them." Dewing was an early convert to Modernism, and in an article published in Art and Progress in 1915 she wrote: “The flower offers a removed beauty that exists only for beauty, more abstract than it can be in the human being, even more exquisite. One may begin with the human figure at the logical and realistic, but in painting the flower one must even begin at the exquisite and distinguished.” Writer Dewing wrote books and articles about keeping house, etiquette and painting, the articles about art were published in Art and Progress and the American Magazine of Art. Her works included the following, written from the perspective of an artist: • Beauty in Dress. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1881. • Beauty in the Household. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882. • From attic to cellar. New York, G. P. Putman's sons, 1879. ==Death==

Maria Oakey Dewing died on December 13, 1927, in the same city where her life began. At that time her daughter was Elizabeth Dewing Bender. Her husband, Thomas, died in 1938. ==Collections==

Her work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, The Hood Museum of Art, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. == References ==