American Art Collaborative

In this painting, Thomas Wilmer Dewing so simplified the space that it appears to exist outside of time. He painted Lady in White (No. 1) in the same year that the United States entered World War I, and works such as this provided Dewing's patrons with an antidote to the turmoil of the times. A contemporary critic remarked that Dewing's women are never eager or anxious, their nerves not toiling and spinning, but in equilibrium (Ross, "Rest for the Weary: American Nervousness and the Aesthetics of Repose," in Ross, Women on the Verge, 2004).