Gretchen Dow
Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85
A
Massachusetts native, she painted geometrically precise images of rural and
seaside New England dwellings that found fans among the storied magazine’s
ardent readers.
Alex
Williams
By Alex
Williams
April 25,
2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/arts/gretchen-dow-simpson-dead.html
Gretchen Dow
Simpson, an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images
of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life
drew comparisons to Edward Hopper and graced the covers of 58 issues of The New
Yorker, died on April 11 at her home in Providence, R.I. She was 85.
The cause
was complications of Lewy body dementia, her daughter Megan Wolff said.
Ms. Simpson
was best known for her meditative images of the seaside and country
architecture of the Northeastern seaboard — “those rather Protestant exteriors
and interiors that Edward Hopper was so taken with,” Carl Little wrote in 1997
in reviewing a Manhattan exhibition of her work for Art in America.
While
modest, solitary buildings were often her subject matter, Ms. Simpson's work
was not purely representational. A former commercial photographer, she applied
a telephoto approach to many of her paintings, zooming in on windows, doorways
or rooftops to emphasize the juxtaposed angles and intersecting lines that
characterized her work, giving it the feel of abstract art.
As ARTnews
noted in a 1995 review of an exhibition of her paintings, Ms. Simpson’s
“emphasis on the solid geometry of the buildings as well as the planar geometry
of surface decoration is further enlivened by the strong contrasts of light and
shadow.”
Her style
became so recognizable that in 1993, Absolut Vodka included it in its
celebrated series of print advertisements featuring the distinctive shape of
its bottle in a series of playful themes, like the work of Andy Warhol or the
sparkling swimming pools of Los Angeles. The “Absolut Dow Simpson” ad, which
fittingly ran on the back cover of The New Yorker, featured a haunting
late-afternoon shadow in the shape of the bottle, cast upon a white clapboard
wall.
Over the
years, Ms. Simpson’s work was commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly (now The
Atlantic), New York magazine and other publications, and featured in solo
exhibitions in New England and New York City. But it was her two-decade run
producing cover paintings for The New Yorker that most shaped her legacy.
Even so, it
took her almost a decade to break through. As she recounted on a 2011 radio
program, she had been receiving rejection notes from the magazine for nine
years before the art director, Lee Lorenz, called her into a meeting in 1974.
As for the
subject matter, she recalled, Mr. Lorenz told her, “Paint what you like, not
what you think we would like.” She ended up snapping a photograph of the
hallway of a friend’s apartment, which had an arched doorway, and using it as
the basis of her first New Yorker painting, which appeared on the cover of the
Aug. 19, 1974, issue.
Ms. Simpson
went on to produce 57 more covers for The New Yorker, attracting fan mail from
readers around the country. “They react in such a personal way that they write
me letters telling me details about their family life,” she said in an
interview with the magazine. “They’re practically inviting me to come in and
eat the leftovers from their icebox.”
Gretchen
Hansell Dow was born on May 17, 1939, in Cambridge, Mass., the eldest of four
children of Richard Dow, the director of a real estate firm, and Elizabeth
(Sagendorph) Dow.
After
graduating from the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., in 1957,
she spent two years studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She
then moved to New York City, where she worked as a photographer at an
advertising agency while pursuing her artistic ambitions.
In 1968, she
married John Simpson Jr., an actor, and the next year they moved to Waverly,
Pa., near Scranton, where Ms. Simpson spent afternoons painting in a converted
barn studio. The couple had two daughters before divorcing in 1982. Ms. Simpson
settled in Providence in 1987.
In 1989,
just before her 50th birthday, Ms. Simpson tallied her 50th New Yorker cover, a
close-up image of gold and silver dance shoes. It was a sly tribute to her
midlife turn as a competitive ballroom dancer, whirling her six-foot-tall frame
around the floor to achieve mastery in the fox trot, the tango, the cha-cha and
other dances.
While she
“hadn’t done much dancing since my coming-out cotillion in Boston,” she said in
a 1989 interview with The New York Times, she found satisfaction in dancing as
both art and exercise. “Jogging bores me, aerobics gives me a headache, tennis
is too social and squash too claustrophobic,” she added. “With ballroom
dancing, you’re using every muscle and along with that you have the plus of
glamour and illusion.”
In 2013, at
age 73, Ms. Simpson married again, to James Baird, a retired Brown University
chemistry professor. He survives her. Over the years, she unveiled a number of
murals in Pawtucket, R.I., including a giant one on Interstate 95 of the
interior of an industrial building. It’s still there today.
In addition
to her husband and her daughter Megan, Ms. Simpson is survived by her other
daughter, Phoebe Bean, and four grandchildren.
Her long run
at The New Yorker ended in 1993, the year after Tina Brown, the swashbuckling
former editor of Vanity Fair, took over and ushered in a series of sweeping
changes, including more topical and gag covers in place of the traditional
stately ones that had served as artworks in their own right.
As Ms.
Simpson later recalled, Ms. Brown “did buy one painting to be used as a cover,
but only because it reminded her of her own property in the Hamptons.”
Alex
Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.