The artist's belief that intuition, emotion and experience were of more importance than thought, reason and analysis manifested itself in some of Dove's early paintings. "It is our instincts that have form, not our thoughts," Dove wrote and he frequently referred to his paintinngs as music for the eyes.

Arthur Garfield Dove was born in 1880 in Canandaiga in upstate New York, about 5 miles southeast of Rochester. His parents moved to nearby Geneva where he grew up and where he attended Hobart College before transferring to Cornel University in Ithaca. At age 24 he moved to New York City and began work as a free-lance commercial illustrator. Shortly after a trip to Europe, he purchased a farm where he hoped to support his art through farming and illustration.

After a long illness he died in 1946 at the age of 66.

Source: Bulletin, September-October 1975.