Decoration - Love's Mesh

Will Hicock Low · 1885/88

Medium

Brown, gray and white gouache on cream wood-pulp laminate board

Original size

8.7 × 35.6 cm (3 7/16 × 14 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

Delicate yet assured, *Decoration — Love's Mesh* captures Will H. Low at his most characteristically lyrical, rendering an allegorical scene in cool gouache tones that feel more like a private reverie than a finished exhibition piece. Low trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran and Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1870s, absorbing the French academic tradition before returning to America as a leading voice of the Aesthetic Movement. Working in brown, gray, and white gouache on a laminate board, he favoured this intimate medium for decorative studies — compositions that were never purely preliminary sketches but refined works in their own right, where restrained colour forced every gesture to carry its full weight. Low was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrating several of his works, and the two shared a conviction that beauty in art needed no further justification than itself — a philosophy visible in the quiet self-sufficiency of a piece like this one. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Low's soft tonal range and fluid draughtsmanship onto canvas, preserving the contemplative mood and graceful figuration that made his decorative work so admired in the Gilded Age — and so rarely seen outside institutional collections today.