The Gray Twilight

A fairly unsung figure in the history of 20th-century American modernism, Arthur Wesley Dow was a painter, printmaker, photographer and influential teacher who combined Far Eastern and Western currents to make art that was at once pictorial and decorative.

His work, mostly landscapes devoid of people, was focused largely on Ipswich, Mass., the seaside town where he grew up and where for many years he maintained a summer school.

The flat but beautifully balanced and colored shapes he painted were poetic distillations rather than representations of the rocks, bays, hills, trees and houses of environments he knew.