Best known for his interiors and landscapes featuring long-lined women in artful poses and subtly related color harmonies, the American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938) used the female figure as the basis for an abstraction of form and color. 

​

Considered at the forefront of developments in modern art, he navigated a course between the bravura of Sargent and the attenuated Aestheticism of Whistler. The result was a sensuous beauty that remains uniquely his and that represents an exceptional phase in American painting. In New York City, where he spent his working life, Dewing found his patrons among those who were connected with the railroads. These businessmen found a refuge from industry in his painted images of the eternal woman.