Maria Oakey Dewing's flowers and figures.

"I hold my heart in my hand when I paint." Maria Oakey Dewing once told a young art student, and she invites us to share these emotions with her through her perceptive painter's eye. (1) With their cutoff foregrounds, her compositions seem to continue the subject into our own space. We are immersed in a tangle of delicate leaves and flowers that are rendered with the artist's characteristic light touch.

So distinctive are these paintings that in her day they were called "absolutely unique." (2)

In addition to these compositions, her career also encompassed some landscape paintings, portraits, and figure paintings, most of which are unlocated today. In fact, she longed for recognition as a figure painter. "I dreamed of groups & figures in big landscapes & still I see them," she recalled at the end of her career, when she considered such works more significant than her flower subjects. (3) She would be surprised to find her reputation reestablished today, once again, by the floral works she undervalued. Her Poppies and Italian Mignonette (frontispiece and Pl. II) and A Rose Garden (Pl. IV) commanded more than one million dollars each at auction at Sotheby's in New York City, in 2000 and 2001 respectively. Carnations (Pl. VI) brought a substantial price as well at Sotheby's, New York, in 2002. Until very recently, these prices were far higher than those paid for paintings by her husband, Thomas Wilmer Dewing (see Fig. 4), a much praised figure painter whose career overshadowed hers.

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A large man with an even larger personality, Dewing was a founding member of the Ten American Painters, a group of American impressionist artists, and a leader of the celebrated art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire. Maria Oakey, as she was born, was equally ambitious and stubborn. At a young age she determined to become a painter: "I ... was swept with desire for art & achievement in it--no the expression of the passion for it & reverence for it--no luxury no affection out weighed it," she recalled of her youth. (4) Born in New York City on October 27, 1845, she was fortunate that her parents' artistic interests encouraged her aspirations. Her mother, Sally Sullivan, was born in Boston and had lived in London as the teenage wife of the painter Gilbert Stuart Newton (1794-1835), a nephew of the painter Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). (5) As a young widow, she returned to New York City where she married William Francis Oakey (b.c.1823), to whom she bore ten children, six of whom survived. Oakey was a prosperous thread importer who traced his ancestry to English landed gentry.

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Maria, who pronounced her first name in the British manner, with a long "i," keenly felt her ties to such an illustrious heritage. Despite the hard times that eventually befell the family, Maria studied at home with a tutor. At first she was torn between becoming a writer or a painter, but at seventeen she decided to focus on art. "It is easy to write," she declared, "it is almost impossible to paint." (6) Her earliest known work was Souvenir de Mal Maison Roses (1862, destroyed), (7) a studio still life that she gave to her beloved second cousin Elizabeth Howard Bartol (see Fig. 3). An artist as well, Bartol lived in a grand family house on Chestnut Street in Boston that was designed by Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844) and built for the mutual great-grandparents of Bartol and Oakey. Maria Oakey visited there often and joined her cousin in studying with the Boston painter William Morris Hunt (1824-1879).