Nabby's Point
ca. 1913
Medium
Color woodcut; trial proof on brown paper
Dimensions
Image: 2 3/16 × 3 3/4 in. (5.6 × 9.5 cm) Sheet: 2 13/16 × 4 1/2 in. (7.1 × 11.4 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
2016.406.5
Tags
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow’s “Nabby’s Point” (ca. 1913) is a small yet luminous color woodcut that captures the artist’s lifelong fascination with simplified form and harmonious color. Measuring just over two by three inches, the intimate trial proof printed on brown paper reveals Dow’s experimental approach to the medium. He drew on Japanese ukiyo-e techniques—carving separate blocks for each hue—to distill a coastal view into flat planes of color and rhythmic line, transforming a specific New England locale into an abstract meditation on light and space. Dow, an influential teacher and theorist, 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...