KATHLEEN PYNE: The women seem to be transfixed, silent, standing still or seated, listening for something.

I’m Kathleen Pyne, professor emerita of Art History at the University of Notre Dame.

The composition is balanced between the kind of luxurious, seductive subtle color shifts of nature and the very fine craftsmanship that he’s used to portray, these very strange women who stand in the middle of nowhere, a meadow or on the edge of a forest, listening very carefully to something we cannot see.

NARRATOR: Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s work suggests evolving ideas about art as an expression of higher life, cultural refinement, and spirituality in a world rocked by debates about science and faith at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century

KATHLEEN PYNE: Dewing’s landscapes speak directly to the way in which individuals could still locate a spiritual presence in the world by communing with nature.

NARRATOR: Here, these women aren’t just in nature; they’re a part of it.

KATHLEEN PYNE: These women are poised as a flowering of nature. Their feet, their origins are hidden from the viewer not simply by their long skirts, but by the grasses that waft up around them. I think the one at the far right who's actually standing there with a fishing pole is completely melded at the base of her body with the landscape.

Dewing meant for his patrons to immerse themselves individually, almost meditate on the image, spend long periods of silence communing with the paintings just as these women are communing with nature all around them.

La Pêche (Fishing)

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