Arthur Garfield Dove (1880-1946) was born in Canandaigua, New York. (He was named for the two soon-to-be-elected Republican candidates that year, Chester Arthur and James Garfield.) His father progressed from a bricklayer to a successful contractor and served his community as County Clerk and Fire Chief. As a child, Dove was influenced by a naturalist, Newton Weatherly, living across the street from his family, who taught him to hunt and fish. Through this friendship he developed a love and responsiveness to nature. Weatherly, who was also an amateur musician and painter, provided Dove's first introduction to painting. Dove attended Hobart College in Geneva, New York, and after two years, transferred to Cornell to study law at his father's insistence. He soon lost interest in law and became increasingly committed to art. One of his instructors encouraged him to become an illustrator, and because of his humorous style, he was asked to illustrate the Cornell yearbook.

After graduation, Dove went to New York where he was soon in demand as a free lance illustrator, with commissions from Harper's, Scribners, Collier's, Saturday Evening Post and Life magazines. As soon as he was able to earn a comfortable income from illustrating, Dove married a woman from his upstate New York home. The couple lived in New York City for the next five years, until Dove decided to forsake commercial illustrating and devote himself to fine art. At that time, Paris was considered the cultural capital of the world by many American artists, so it was not surprising that Dove decided to travel to France where he and his wife stayed for eighteen months. While abroad, Dove's work was exhibited twice, winning high favor in the Autumn Salon in Paris. As the young artist discovered following his return to America, it was not possible to live by art alone.

The following year, Dove received an introduction to Alfred Stieglitz through his best friend and fellow artist, Alfred Maurer. According to Dove's biographer Barbara Haskell, this began a deep personal and artistic relationship between Dove and Stieglitz that was to last throughout their lives. Haskell writes,

Stieglitz's contribution to American art of the first quarter of the century cannot be overestimated. It was a time when American society was relatively indifferent to the existence of artists. . . . In the face of an unresponsive public, Stieglitz's gallery was the only center where artists could find the support and stimulation they so desperately needed. Stieglitz played a sheltering, patriarchal role, especially to the three artists whom he most fervently and consistently supported: John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove. When asked what Stieglitz meant to him as an artist, Dove said, "I do not think I could have existed as a painter without that super-encouragement and the battle he has fought day by day for twenty-five years. He is without a doubt the one who has done the most for art in America."

Haskell further explains that Stieglitz's galleries ("291," "The Intimate Gallery" and "An American Place") were not commercial ventures, but places where artists were provided with a place to exhibit their work. No attempt was made to please the public or explain the meaning of what was exhibited.

Dove's son, William, was born in 1910, and the family immediately moved to a farm in Connecticut. The artist hoped to support his family and his painting by farming, raising chickens and vegetables. Though he worked from 4:00 AM until midnight, it was difficult to make a living, and he found little time for painting. When Dove asked his father to help out with $100 a month, the father declined, unable to understand his son's need to paint. After seeing Arthur's one-man show at Stieglitz's gallery, the elder Dove reportedly said, "No, I won't encourage this madness." Haskell writes, "Having chosen art above material comforts, money was a struggle that plagued him all the rest of his life."

Dove and his wife separated, but she would not agree to a divorce, nor would she allow him to see his son. Consequently, Dove and his son did not meet again until after Florence Dove's death when the boy was nineteen. Arthur Dove lived first on a houseboat and then on a second-hand yacht for seven years, cruising Long Island Sound during the summer and tying up at harbor in the winter. His companion during those years was painter Helen Torr, called Reds, whom he married in 1929. (Torr's self-portrait is included in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection.) Conditions were difficult in the often cold, cramped quarters of the sailboat, but Dove and Reds were mutually supportive and understanding as well as deeply committed to each other. Though the boat needed Dove's constant attention, he managed to continue painting, and, even in such adverse circumstances, to exhibit annually at Stieglitz's gallery. From 1926 on, Dove was financially supported by a steady though meager income ($1,000 annually) from his only patron, Duncan Phillips, who had purchased one of his paintings from Stieglitz. Despite a warm response from reviewers, few sales were made to anyone other than Phillips.

Early in his career, about 1910, Arthur Dove took a radical step in his painting as he began making nonrepresentational art, possibly influenced by what he had seen in France. He publicly exhibited the first modernist art seen in America, displaying forms abstracted from nature and using organic shapes that recalled landscape forms. All of Dove's compositions were derived from the external world. He continued to produce challenging avant-garde paintings throughout the rest of his life. Historian Barbara Rose writes, "Dove's color sense and bold patterning . . . are sufficient to distinguish him as a painter of extraordinarily potent image and original lyrical vision of nature." In addition to his paintings, Arthur Dove produced a group of assemblages or collages incorporating actual pieces of everyday reality-- three-dimensional objects projecting from a flat background. (One of these works, Ten Cent Store, is included in the Sheldon Gallery collection.)

Dove and Reds continued to live on Long Island, except for a period of time in the 1930s when they returned to Geneva, N.Y. to settle his parents' estate, mismanaged and in bankruptcy after his parents' death. Returning to Long Island in 1938, they discovered and purchased an abandoned one-room post office in Centerport, N.Y. This was converted into a studio where they lived and worked for the remainder of their lives. Dove's health deteriorated following complications from a heart attack, and though he was productive, and enthusiastic about life, he remained a semi-invalid until his death in 1946. Helen Torr lived on until 1967.