Rose Garden

Maria Oakey Dewing painted Rose Garden during one of her last summers in Cornish, New Hampshire, an artists’ colony where she and her family had spent every summer for 15 years. The cropped, close-up study of flowers, color, and texture places the viewer among the leaves, stems, and blossoms of her garden.
Trained at Cooper Union School of Design for Women and the National Academy of Design, Dewing had a successful career. In the 1880s, after her marriage to Thomas Wilmer Dewing, a prominent figure painter, she perfected her flower painting. She referred to her flower paintings as “modern,” seeing abstraction in the flowers: “The flower offers a removed beauty that exists only for beauty, more abstract than it can be in the human being, even more exquisite."