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| Arthur Dove Tree Trunk ca. 1929 pastel on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Arthur Dove Approaching Snow Storm 1934 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Arthur Dove Summer 1935 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Arthur Dove Pond in Sunlight 1935 tempera on paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Arthur Dove Sunrise 1937 watercolor on paper Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Arthur Dove Tanks 1938 oil and wax on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Arthur Garfield Dove (1880-1946) spent his early years in Geneva, New York, where his father was a building contractor and brick manufacturer. He attended Hobart College before transferring to Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1903. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator for various popular periodicals for several years. . . . In 1910 and 1911 Dove created a number of inventive works of art that used stylized, abstract forms at a remarkably early date in American art; he is considered the first American artist to have created such purely nonrepresentational imagery. . . . In 1921 Dove left his wife and son for the artist Helen Torr, nicknamed "Reds," the wife of the illustrator Clive Weed. Dove and Torr (who would eventually marry in 1932) began living together on a houseboat at Halesite, on the north shore of Long Island. Dove's primary subject for his art was the local landscape, which he simplified into its essential forms with expressive color and line. His first-hand experience of the ocean tides, weather patterns, and seasonal cycles also informed these works, as did his quest for a symbolic color effect that he called "a condition of light." As he described the latter idea in an autobiographical essay, "It applied to all objects in nature, flowers, trees, people, apples, cows. These all have their certain condition of light, which establishes them to the eyes, to each other, and to the understanding." . . . When Dove's mother died in 1933, Dove and his brother became co-executors of the family estate in Geneva, New York. Dove, who had been struggling financially, moved to Geneva with Reds and lived on his family's property while settling the debt-ridden estate. Despite his reluctance to relocate to Geneva, which he considered provincial, Dave remained there with Reds through 1938. Geneva provided him with new subject matter for his art, including the family farm, the local barnyard animals, and nearby lakes, as well as the city's more industrial downtown area of warehouses and railroad tracks. . . . In 1938 Dove and Torr returned to Long Island and rented a small house, a former post office that stood directly on the shore of a mill pond in Centerport. Forced to live a sedentary life after a heart attack and a diagnosis of severe kidney disease, Dove found his view confined to the immediate neighborhood around his home. However, he transformed this limitation into a period of experimentation with form and medium. In a diary entry for August 5, 1942, Dove directed himself to work at the "point where abstraction and reality meet."
– excerpted from a biographical essay by Jessica Murphy on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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| Arthur Dove Sun on the Lake 1938 oil and wax and resin on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Arthur Dove Untitled 1942 watercolor on paper Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Arthur Dove Untitled 1942 watercolor on paper Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Arthur Dove Roof Tops 1943 oil and resin on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Arthur Dove Abstract Study with Red Triangle 1943-44 tempera on paper Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Arthur Dove Abstract Study with Blue Rectangle 1943-44 tempera on paper Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Arthur Dove That Red One 1944 oil and wax on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Arthur Dove Pieces of Red, Green and Blue 1944 oil and wax on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |