Gretchen Dow Simpson

Gretchen Dow Simpson (born 1939 in Cambridge, MA) is a indigenous New Englander painter. She is the author of more than 60 magazine covers for The New Yorker Magazine.

Simpson is the daughter of Elizabeth Sagendorph Dow and Richard A. Dow, who lived in Dover, Mass. Simpson was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, class of 1961. In 2005, Simpson time-honored a Pell Grant. In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from Bryant University, a private academic world in Rhode Island. Her two daughters are Megan and Phoebe.

Simpson spent many years thriving in New York City, and from the 1970s to the 1990s beyond 50 of her paintings were featured as covers of The New Yorker Magazine. Gretchen Dow Simpson has shown her bill at the Virginia Lynch Gallery in RI and the Mary Ryan Gallery in NYC.
Her be active is best known for her crisp & close-up views of New England architecture and for attention to details, proportions, and lighting effects. Simpson considers herself a “painter following a photographer’s eye,” and architectural forms have always drawn her. She is moreover drawn to geometry and scale.
On October 2012 a 1,300-square-foot highway mural, based upon one of her paintings, was installed upon Interstate 95 in Pawtucket, RI as allocation of the former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee's Highway Beautification Project.

Simpson's piece of legislation is exhibited in New York City, Maine, and Rhode Island, and many of her paintings are in private collections.