Arthur Wesley Dow taught at major American arts training institutions for 30 years including Teachers College, Columbia University; the Art Students League of New York; Pratt Institute; and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art. His ideas were quite revolutionary for the period, he taught that rather than copying nature, art should be created by elements of the composition, like line, mass and color. He taught many of America's leading artists and craftspeople, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles J. Martin, two of the Overbeck Sisters and the Byrdcliffe Colony.

A mentor to Georgia O'Keeffe, Dow literally "wrote the book" on composition. First published in 1899, this manual influenced generations of teachers and students. Relevant to all of the visual arts, it employs a workbook format to impart principles regarding harmonic relations between lines, color, and dark and light patterns.

First published in 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow's "Composition" has probably influenced more Americans than any other text to think of visual form and composition in relation to artistic modernity. While Dow is known as the mentor of Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber, his legacy as a proponent of modern art has suffered undeserved neglect by recent artists and art historians. In "Composition" Dow develops a system for teaching students to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and dark and light patterns. Greatly influenced by Japanese art, he expounds a theory of "flat" formal equilibrium as an essential component of telling pictorial creation. Generations of teachers and their public school pupils learned from Dow's orientalism and adopted basic postimpressionist principles without even knowing the term. The reappearance of Dow's practical, well-illustrated guide, enhanced by Joseph Masheck's discussion of its historical ramifications, is an important event for all concerned with the visual arts and the intellectual antecedents of American modernism.

Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator. He taught many of America's leading artists and craftspeople, including Georgia O'Keeffe, two of the Overbeck Sisters and the Byrdcliffe Colony. Dow was largely inspired by Japanese art to this work on Compositionn.