The Long Road--Argilla Road, Ipswich

In the 1890s, Arthur Wesley Dow discovered the art of Japan through his close friendship with Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), America’s leading Asian art expert and curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. For Dow, Japanese art represented a radical departure from what he perceived as the stagnant style of naturalism dominating his early oeuvre and the Boston art world. He explored his new sensibility in color woodcuts, such as this one, that render a landscape as an almost abstract arrangement of colors and shapes. Dow’s ideas were disseminated widely through his roles as a curator, teacher, and author of the influential art book Composition (1899), which was heavily illustrated with Japanese examples.