Arthur Bowen Davies | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928)

Arthur Bowen Davies was a fascinating individual and a remarkably talented artist who was always poised between the traditional world of art and the avant-garde movements of his day. Born in Utica, New York September 26, 1862, Davies had his first lessons in painting from local artist Dwight Williams before he moved to Chicago with his family in 1878. Soon after his arrival Davies enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Design and studied under J. Roy Robertson.

Like most artists of his day Davies knew that he had to go to New York to continue his artistic education and, eventually, to make a name for himself. He arrived in Manhattan in 1886 and enrolled at the Art Students League. Following a long tradition in American art, Davies relied on his graphic art talents to earn a livelihood. He was an illustrator for the popular magazines The Century and St. Nicholas. Davies’s artistic career received a welcome boost in the late 1880s when his work began being accepted into exhibitions in Boston and New York.

Perhaps because he felt settled in his career, Davies married Virginia Merriweather, a physician, in 1892. The couple moved to a farm near Congers in Rockland County New York, not far from Manhattan. In 1893, Davies established a studio in New York and began commuting to the city for the week and returning to the farm only on weekends. In 1902 he began to lead a double life. In that year he met Edna Potter, a young dancer in New York, and started seeing her on a regular basis. Eventually, Davies and Potter moved in together and lived as a couple under the pseudonym Mr. and Mrs. David Owen, though he continued to visit his wife regularly. He had two sons with Virginia Merriweather and one daughter with Edna Potter.

Initially Davies worked in the realistic, nineteenth-century landscape tradition. However, he quickly began to experiment with the more romantic and visionary style for which he became renowned. He was heavily influenced by the dreamlike landscapes of fellow Americans George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder. He was also inspired by the paintings of French Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Davies’s big break came in 1895 when noted gallery owner William Macbeth took an interest in his art. The dealer convinced the collector and department store owner Benjamin Altman to finance a trip abroad for Davies, the first of several. In the 1890s Davies traveled to Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich, Milan, Hamburg, Rome, and Naples. In Italy in 1897 he saw, for the first time, the Pompeian wall frescoes. These paintings reinforced his predilection toward classical subject matter and composition and inspired many later works. Davies went overseas again in 1910-1911, to Italy and Greece.

In his works from the late 1890s and early 1900s, Davies created paintings filled with voluptuous female nudes placed in idyllic sylvan settings that are stylistically similar to paintings by de Chavannes and to the frieze-like form of the classical frescoes of Pompeii. His subjects were both classical and mythological.

Davies was also fascinated by the Symbolist movement, which emphasized the inner, subjective feelings of the artist as the basis for painting rather than objective reality. It was not so much what the artist saw, but how he felt about it and responded to it that mattered. The subconscious ruled and was the source of inspiration. Davies admired the works of the French Symbolist painter Odilon Redon and the German Arnold Bocklin, especially their depiction of dreamlike states and fantastical imagery.

Although Davies’s art was fairly traditional in many aspects, he was not; he had a rebellious streak and continually supported independent and avant-garde art movements. In 1908 Davies participated in an exhibition referred to as “The Eight” by scholars of American art. The show, which took place at Macbeth Gallery, Davies’s dealer, included paintings by Davies, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast. These artists had very divergent styles of painting; however, they were united in their belief that the National Academy of Design was static and that its exhibitions held a virtual monopoly on opportunities for American artists to exhibit and sell their work. In their independent effort they hoped to expand the horizons for American artists beyond the walls of the Academy. A few years later he spearheaded the movement within the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the group that organized the Armory Show.

Davies admired modern art and supported it throughout his life. Like many American artists who attend the Armory Show, he was particularly struck by the paintings of Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse, and by the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi. In his own painting he experimented with a pseudo-Cubist technique. This phase of his art lasted from roughly 1914 until 1917. Many of the pieces he created were large-scale figurative works, mainly women. These pictures did not, however, find favor among the wealthy patrons with whom Davies was quite familiar. Although he returned to a more naturalistic mode in his painting, he remained a strong supporter of abstract art and amassed a collection of works by European modernists such as Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. He also acquired works by fellow Americans including those of the Stieglitz circle and others of “The Eight.”

Arthur Bowen Davies suffered his first heart attack in 1923 and went abroad to recuperate. Beginning in 1924 he went abroad for six months each year. It was during one of these excursions to Florence that he died of a second heart attack on October 24, 1928.