Ipswich High School - Tiger Yearbook (Ipswich, MA)

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efforts of his wife, two of his famous paintings to the high school. I so greatly hoped to find out that the sketches were the work of Arthur Wesley Dow. It seemed to me to be the only desirable solution, disproving our foolish thoughts that the drawings had been made by a man who didn’t carry on his art work beyond young manhood. Who with such decided talent could possibly have ignored it or failed to carry it on into prominence? There were, however, opposing facts which tended to disprove this theory. It was Miss Condon who pointed them out . . . Why should the sketchbook have been found in the Manning School when Mr. Dow had attended Newbury- port High School and had no contact with the Manning building? Most of the men pictured on the pages were of a very scholarly type with delicate hands. Mr. Dow’s folks were farmers and laborers with strong, hard hands that had known what it was to do difficult physical work . . . The windows in the interior scenes had large panes of glass and tasseled draperies, luxuries which undoubtedly were not found in the humbly-situated Dow family. There followed an interview with Mr. Johnson, who thought it quite prob able that the book was Mr. Dow’s work, for he noticed that the writing of the dates beneath the sketches resem- bled samples that he had of Mr. Dow’s. There was also another talk with Miss Condon, who felt quite sure that Mr. Dow had not drawn the pictures, but that they might be the work of Mr. Everett Hubbard, an Ipswich poet, who had had considerable artistic talent, also. It was then that I turned in earnest to jMr. Johnson’s Life story of Mr. Dow. I took also the sketchbook (which I’ve kept for many weekends) and referred to it from time to time as I ran across congruent dates. Arthur Wesley Dow was born in the Norton-Cobbet House in 1857. He early showed a sensitive, poetic nature, coupled with a love for doing hand- work. He was fascinated by clocks of all kinds and spent many hours of his boyhood in tinkering with them and in taking them apart. (I referred to a sketch of a banjo clock.) Dow graduated from Newburyport High School in 1875. (I noticed a sketch of the rear platform of a train, possibly made while commuting to and from school) . There followed a time of disappointment at not being able to attend Amherst College. Instinctively his love of handwork developed more and more into a keen love for drawing, which filled the empty hours of uncer- tainty. He turned, not to copy the il- lustrations of others, but to the marshes and dunes and the wealth of old houses about him. The houses especially fas- cinated him, for he realized that they were the expression of the art of two- hundred and fifty years of the people of New England. (I turned again to 19

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My next impulse was to show the sketches to our artist friend, Miss Har- riet D. Condon. She would have known that period and would undoubtedly be interested in the signed record of a layman’s artistic development. She was. She even recognized the locus of a tree by a sketch of it (the most carefully and wonderfully made of them all) and other scenes of Ipswich Basin and Water Street. But the people she did not recognize. She said, during the course of our conversation, that in some of the pic- tures she was reminded of the technique of the fine artist, Arthur W. Dow. She had taken some lessons from him and learned that his policy was to strive mainly for composition. He w ould draw a simple pattern, she said, on a square or oblong piece of paper and fill in trees, animals, or people wher- ever he felt that they were needed. Could G. W. F. have been a pupil of Mr. Dow’s? And who could G. W. F. have been? “George Farley’’ was the reply, “but he was not gifted in the line of art at all.” Perhaps he had hidden talent of which this book is the only record! I was sure that it was George Farley. The mystery was solved at the end of a pleasant evening. Racing home, I showed the book to my father who had been away, and I made no comments as he went through it. Telling the solution of a mystery before one has been acquainted with the mystery itself is no way to arouse a person’s interest! But before I could explain my luck, he said , “Do you know, this picture bears a strong re- semblance to Arthur Dow. His picture is in the frontispiece of Mr. Arthur Johnson’s life story of him. Perhaps it is a picture by Mr. Dow of his father.” We eagerly brought out the life of Mr. Dow. Indeed, the man in the sketchbook had the same short beard but a broader chin than Arthur Dow’s. He had the same penetrating eyes. From that moment dated our supposition that Mr. Arthur Dow himself was the artist of the sketchbook! We dismissed the initials G. W. F. as a sketch of and not by Mr. George Farley. Arthur Wesley Dow — the man who was proud to be a native of Ipswich. He graduated from Newburyport High School, studied art in Paris and Japan, became an authority on Eastern Art, a painter of wide fame, author of a universally popular book upon com- position, a teacher at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and head of the Art Depart- ment of Columbia University until his death. Yet essentially, he remained a native of Ipswich, striving to portray truthfully in bis paintings the spirit of New England as he knew it from his life in Ipswich, leaving his studio site on Bayberry Hill as a park for the Town of Ipswich, and, through the 18

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the sketchbook which offered humor- ous sketches of houses and the river and landscapes.) Part of this lonely period of Mr. Dow ' s life was spent in teaching at the Linebrook school, and in aiding Rev. Augustine Caldwell of Worcester to se- cure enough information and illustra- tions of Essex County to complete and edit the unfinished genealogical work of Mr. Abraham Hammatt, whose early death prevented him from finishing it himself. Through Mr. Caldwell, Dow met a Mrs. Freeland of Worcester, from whom he received encouragement and instruction in art. (There are un- familiar scenes in the sketchbook which might conceivably be of Worcester.) Dow continued to draw under his own initiative, and it is mainly in a period corresponding to this that the sketches in the little book were made. At one point he determined to study the complicated anatomy of human beings by first becoming acquainted with that of lower forms of life. Hearing that a cow had died in a pasture on Little Neck, he procured the remains and trundled them home in a wheel- barrow. He boiled and bleached the bones in the kitchen while his patient mother looked on. He studied the curves of the cow’s bones before he at- tempted to draw live animals. (With a smile, I found a whole page of sketches of cows in various positions.) ‘Every day he sketched . . . the people about him; types of weather-beaten men interested him and he would get them to sit and talk (than which they loved nothing better to do) while he sketched them, adding to his increasing skill of hand and rich material for his collection of folk-lore.” (I notice the many drawings of men in the sketch- book, some rough-hewn, coarse, others scholarly, fishing, walking, lying in the grass, reading, smoking.) There seemed to be every indication that the great Mr. Dow himself had made that sketchbook. I was ready to swear that he had, until my eye fell upon the paragraph immediately fol- lowing: “It was during the latter part of 1880 that his career as a solitary Ips- wich artist came to an end for he found in Everett Stanley Hubbard” (the very man whom Miss Condon had mention- ed) “a neighbor of the same age, tal- ents, and aspirations as his own. There began a friendship which continued through many years. It ripened through days of companionship spent in sketch- ing about the town. They would choose the same subject and each inter- pret it in terms of his own reaction, then offer mutual criticism. The joy of companionship there was much of the pleasant zest of competition.” “The latter part of 1880” — I turn to the latter part of the sketchbook and find many drawings dated August 27, 1880. What a splendid time the two of them must have had that day! They 20