I Dreamt I Saw Thee Robed in Purple Flakes

Will Hicock Low · 1885

Medium

Gray and white gouache, with touches of black gouache, on cream wood-pulp laminate board

Original size

21 × 45.4 cm (8 5/16 × 17 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Spare and luminous, this 1885 work by Will Hicock Low distills a dreamlike vision into a quiet arrangement of grays, whites, and shadow — a mood more felt than described. Low was among a generation of American painters shaped by rigorous French academic training; he studied under Carolus-Duran in Paris, the same master who taught John Singer Sargent. His work sits comfortably within the Aesthetic Movement, favouring beauty, atmosphere, and literary suggestion over narrative weight. Working in gouache on a cream board rather than canvas or panel, Low exploited the medium's opacity and matte surface to build soft, chalky light that gives this piece its otherworldly stillness — a quality oil paint rarely achieves so effortlessly. The title draws from the Romantic poetic tradition Low admired deeply, and the work's restrained palette — almost entirely achromatic — pushes the dreamlike premise into something genuinely strange and tender. The original, now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a small and intimate thing. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates that intimacy faithfully, preserving the tonal delicacy and compositional hush that make Low's vision so affecting, while giving it the depth and permanence of oil on canvas.