The Big Sky, or Marshes
ca. 1912
Medium
Color woodcut
Dimensions
Image: 2 3/16 × 3 3/4 in. (5.6 × 9.6 cm) Sheet: 2 11/16 × 4 5/16 in. (6.8 × 10.9 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
2016.213
Rights
Public Domain
Tags
Art Historical Context
Arthur Wesley Dow’s *The Big Sky, or Marshes* (ca. 1912) captures the quiet drama of an expansive sky stretching over low-lying wetlands. Printed in delicate layers of color, the small woodcut invites viewers to linger on the subtle gradations of blue and the rhythmic bands of marsh grass. Its modest size—just over three by four inches—belies the sense of vastness Dow achieves through careful composition and restrained palette. Dow was a leading figure in the American revival of the color woodcut, drawing inspiration from Japanese ukiyo-e prints while adapting their techniques to native lands...
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...