Black And Gold 1917

This is 'Black and Gold' by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. I am immediately struck by the color – it's almost entirely gold. It's really about how much you can get out of one color and the way that the artist treats the paint is very economical. If you look closely, you can see a ton of stuff happening with a very limited palette. Dewing has built up the image slowly, it’s not overworked and it’s not labored, there are thin layers of oil paint over and over, like veils. This kind of layering of semitransparent paint is called glazing. You can see it’s really thin and not obscuring the layers below. I love that little shadow, which is almost the only dark passage in the painting, it sits right under the dress and grounds the whole composition. Paintings like this always make me think of Whistler, he also did these amazing, tonal studies. So much can be said with just a few, well-chosen tones, right?