Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Dow was initially influenced by the French Barbizon School of painters and the American realist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879). However, the course of his career was permanently altered in 1891, when he met Ernest Fenallosa, the curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fenallosa introduced Dow to the work of Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, the masters of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
Dow adopted the aesthetic principle that art should not imitate nature, but should develop from the abstract relationships between line, color and tone. He went on to teach these ideas at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University Teachers College, all in New York, as well as at the summer arts colony he established in Ipswich. The traditional Japanese motifs that went on to dominate Dow's printmaking greatly influenced the early generation of American modernists and printmakers.
