Gretchen Dow Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85

New York Times

25-04-2025

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.'