Edwin Dickinson: A Critical History of His Paintings

This book is the first to be published on the paintings of the important, but neglected, American painter Edwin Dickinson. It includes extensive analyses of all of Dickinson's major paintings and discussions of a wide range of his other work. His paintings, done in three diverse modes, are related to his biography and artistic development, his attitudes and interests, the artistic traditions he drew upon, and the effect of his personal losses on his work. Because Dickinson suffered from depression and never fully recovered from the death of his mother when he was eleven and his brother when he was twenty-one, the character and meaning of many of his paintings is considered in relation to research on mourning and depression. Symbolic implications of the paintings' imagery are discussed in relation to their formal structure and expressive effect. Among the materials studied in researching the book were fifty-six years of the artist's journals and thousands of pages of his letters. There are 19 color plates and 65 black-and-white illustrations.