The Art Students League served as a key training ground in miniature painting, where students acquired skills particular to watercolor painting on ivory, as well as a solid grounding in figural representation, so evident in drawings in the school’s collection.
Edwin Dickinson’s paintings are swimming in the ocean of visual sensations and have just barely started to crawl up onto the land and become “things” that the brain can identify, and therefore, exert hegemony over.
As all portrait artists know, there is something solemnly ceremonious about the full-profile position. We do not make eye contact—that being somehow beneath the authority of the subject—just as the set mouth seems to be not just momentarily, but eternally, silent.