Arthur Wesley Dow was an artist, teacher and theoretician whose interest in the design principles of Eastern art helped pave the way for the development of Modernism in the United States. A native of Ipswich, Dow studied in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Paris, before returning to his native town in 1889. There while painting of the low-lying salt marshes near his home, he developed the views on mass, line, and color that became the basis for his influential book of 1899 entitled Composition.

In 1895 Dow moved to New York, where he taught at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University's Teacher College. His influence was far-reaching, encompassing both the fine and decorative arts; his notion that artists should work in an "imaginative manner" set an especially important example to painters such as Max Weber, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Steele. (Carol Lowrey, Spanierman Gallery)