The Long Road, Argilla Road

The color woodcut The Long Road, Argilla Road is a vista of the rural road leading to Crane Beach near Ipswich, Massachusetts, Arthur Wesley Dow's home for much of his life and an important source of artistic inspiration for his landscape images. In this impression, simplified shapes in shades of bright green and brown broadly indicate trees on the roadside in the right foreground, fields receding into the distance, and the sandy lane meandering toward clumps of trees on the horizon. Dow's choice of cheerful blues for the sky, partly veiled by clouds, suggests the full light of day flooding the scene. The image is typical of Dow's approach to landscape in its high horizon; open, unpeopled expanse of space; and placid calm.

Dow was an experimental woodcut printmaker who often varied his color combinations from impression to impression to create quite different effects of mood, time, and weather from a single set of blocks, one for each color in the final image. This impression, made years after he carved the woodblock around 1898, was a unique arrangement of colors he rarely repeated in other impressions from the same series of blocks. In another impression, titled The Purple Sky (The Long Road), Spring (TF 1995.32), he applied different, pale colors to suggest a dawn or twilight hour for the same scene.

A great admirer of Japanese art, Dow was inspired by its example to abstract nature rather than realistically represent it. Dow's color woodcuts and teachings helped to disseminate Japanism, or the passion for all things Japanese, to other American artists, including Eliza Draper Gardiner, as demonstrated in her figural woodcut images Boy and Goose (TF 1996.19) and Pickaback (TF 1996.20).

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Le Japonisme en Amérique: oeuvres sur papier, 1880–1930 (Japonisme in America: Works on Paper, 1880–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, September 15–November 30, 2002.

Manifest Destiny, Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Loyola University Museum of Art, May 17–August 10, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art (organizers). Venue: Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China, September 28, 2018–January 6, 2019. [exh. cat.]

Moffatt, Frederick C. Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1977. No. 29.

Acton, David and Joseph Goddu. Along Ipswich River: The Color Woodcuts of Arthur Wesley Dow. (exh. cat., Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc.). New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., 1990. No. 32 and no. 33.

Brownlee, Peter John. Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008. Text pp. 29, 35 (checklist); Ill. Pl. 12, p. 49 (color). Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865-1945. (exh. cat. Shanghai Museum with Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art). Shanghai: Shanghai Museum, 2018. Text p. 47; ill. p. 49 (color).