About Edwin Dickinson

Born in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1891, Edwin Dickinson studied painting in New York City with William Merritt Chase, before moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to attend the classes of Charles Hawthorne. After a stint in the US Navy during World War I and two years in Paris, he settled on Cape Cod, where he would remain until 1944.

As his large, symbolic figure paintings became better known in the 1940s, he moved to New York. There he gained a reputation as a teacher, respected by progressive younger painters for his vision as an artist and his independence. Hailed as a “painter’s painter,” Dickinson was celebrated at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and in major retrospective exhibitions in 1965 and at the time of his death in 1978.