Edwin M. Dawes

 

Edwin M. Dawes (1872-1945) was an American landscape painter. This site shows twenty one photographs. The collection was started by Tim White in 2003. Tim also presents the results of his exhaustive research into Dawes's life and paintings in this PDF file. He concludes his report with these words:

Of the few hundred paintings Dawes can be surmised to have made, less than thirty are known to still exist. As a painter myself, the tired trope of an artist dying in obscurity gnaws. I hope to answer as many unknowns of Dawes’ life as possible, and to restore the regard that his moving works merit.

My own interest is that Edwin is a distant relative. Many cousins would to know him and his works better.

If you learn about one of his paintings being offered for sale, or if you want to sell one you own, please let us know. See one for sale below right now! Go to this Google Group to contact me for more information...  ... Reggie Dawes:

groups.google.com/group/edwin-m-dawes-art

EDWIN MINOT DAWES
GALLERY

A new Dawes painting has been discovered! This brings our total to 21 on this site. Edwin may have painted 200. There are about 30 known survivors; finding another fine one like this gives us cause to celebrate.

Announcing!

Off the Massachusetts Coast

Photographed  by the owner, Charles Brand, who said "... The painting belonged to my great uncle Charles Bowles Rodgers and his wife Mary Van Dusen. They were married in Minneapolis May 7, 1913 and the painting was a wedding present. On the stretcher in pencil is written "Off the Massachusetts Coast" and $150.00. It measures 30" x 24". Until 1914, Ford plant workers earned a minimum wage of  $2.34 per day: $150 would have been about two months pay!

Charles also sent this great close-up of the signature area. This magnified view lets us see brush strokes. This picture is not flat: the lighting lets us see oil on canvas on our computer screens. The signature is distinct but not distracting. Edwin was a popular artist for many years. There are known forgeries out there. Owners, please send a close up of the signature area of your painting along with the provenance and  photographs, and any pencil notes on the frame. We'd be tickled to post any quality forgeries you may submit!

I really appreciate the fine pictures and complete details that Charles has provided. For the sake of art and history, I'd like to ask all you owners to get a good 15+ megapixel photograph taken by a professional so more of us can appreciate good reproductions of Edwin's work. Professionals have the right lighting and lenses that don't do a barrel-distortion of rectangles. But any large-scale photo you send me is likely to be useful, as were the ones above.

This is the only Edwin painting I've seen of man-made objects. Click the image for a 650KB file, suitable for printing, Owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

When Edwin painted this scene, he was running his father's baking powder factory. He left that and spent the next 30 years on natural scenes.  Edwin once said

“there is a quality in nature which no painter seems to have expressed. That is the ‘something’ which I seek to present. I may never succeed in depicting it, but I am going to have a serious try at it. It is a joy to strive for it, even though one may never interpret it. It seems to me the trouble lies chiefly in the fact that the closer one comes to expressing an ideal, the further one sees beyond.”

Here's a catalog entry from a book on Minnesota art describing Channel to the Mills:

Edward M Dawes began his career as a self-taught sign painter, and gained fame as a Minnesota landscapist and later painted in Nevada and California. Channel to the Mills treats Minnesota’s most frequently painted cityscape, the flour mills that line the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and which produced the city’s wealth for decades. Dawes’ major work in Minnesota, the painting plays the curves of water and smoke against the geometric battlements of the massive stone mills.

Edwin's foreground shows a wasteland, with a grimy-looking channel carved by nature coming from the mills. While industrialists of the era saw wealth in the mills, Edwin also painted the damage that industry causes. In my 40 years as a plant chemist, I was pleased that government finally started taking serious actions to control pollution.

  Top 

 visits since July 2008