"Anyone who took an art class in a public school at some point in the first thirty-five years or so of this century was likely to have been introduced to the oriental mysteries of notan and the art of composing shapes within the confines of a predetermined rectangle." The author, writing in 1977, was speaking of Arthur Wesley Dow and his national reputation as an art educator. In fact, Dow's achievements as a teacher overshadowed his legacy as a painter and printmaker, and particularly as a photographer.

Dow's interest in pictorial photography began around 1895 and places him in the center of the modern photography movement, not as a driving force but as a kindred spirit. His interest in Japanese prints and his theories of pattern, design, and composition found great favor with pictorial photographers. He applied the same compositional principles of notan to his paintings and woodcuts as well as to his photographs. Further, Dow used his photographs both "as studies for paintings and as independent images." For this exhibition, an Ipswich canvas with a vertical orientation and high horizon line has been included to provide a means of comparing patterning, design, and composition in the same subject but in different media.

In our time, the recognition of Dow as a painter was first revealed nationally in the exhibition Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in 1977, which was accompanied by a catalogue by Frederick C. Moffatt. Twenty-four years later, the depth of Dow's talent as a photographer has been revealed in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts of the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, in 2001, at Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, in 2002, and now at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. This exhibition is a continuation of the effort to bring attention to Dow the photographer.