Born on September 26, 1862, Arthur Bowen Davies grew up in Utica, New York. By an early age he was already dabbling in watercolors and, as his talents progressed, Davies developed something of a reputation as a budding artist in his neighborhood. His parents in general provided a home environment that celebrated creativity and Arthur‘s boyhood works were displayed with pride.
Chicago and Santa Fe
After some initial study with local artist Dwight Williams, Arthur accompanied his family to Chicago and took a bookkeeper position at the Board of Trade. He continued to develop his artistic skills in his free time with coursework at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the School of the Art Institute, and by keeping up the regular practice of life-sketching and copying that he had begun as a child.
A developing case of tuberculosis prompted Davies to consider a change of career and climate, sending him out west with the Santa Fe Railroad as a draftsman. Davies traveled from New Mexico to Mexico, meeting quite a variety of cowboy-type characters and sketching his observations along the way. Another temporary occupation that helped Davies keep financially solvent was climbing up onto scaffolding and painting billboard advertising signs for tobacco. He also worked as a magazine illustrator, like many of his artistic contemporaries.
New York and the Armory Show
Davies married in 1890 and with his wife lived on a farm known as The Golden Bough in Congers, New York while keeping his studio in Manhattan. He exhibited with a group of artists known as The Eight—also called the Ashcan School painters—at their pivotal Macbeth Gallery show in 1908, and he was President of the Society of Independent Artists.
Davies was supportive of other emerging talents and an adviser to wealthy collectors, helping them to choose new and exciting art investments. Davies was also one of the driving forces behind the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (best known as the Armory Show), which turned New York’s 69th Regiment Armory into a showcase for early 20th century avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky.
A Study in Contrasts
There was, however, more to this seeming profile of a happily married, modern-minded artist, patron, and leader in the art community. Davies was curiously complex and abstruse, a deceptively diffident ladies’ man who edged beyond his existing vows to wed one of his long-time models and have a child with her. This double duty prompted Davies to secretly take on another name and lead another life in order to be part of his second family.
Furthermore, though Davies had his name linked to and exhibited with the Eight, he did not quite share the same artistic focus as the majority of the octet. The Eight preferred compellingly lifelike, generally urban scenes, and they rejected academic perfection. The vivid realism of key Eight members Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks and Everett Shinn, for example, compared to the airy and alabaster compositions of Arthur B. Davies is a study in contrasts. Davies’ works suggest beautiful dreams populated mainly by graceful nude female figures. He found great inspiration in mythology and classic and personal symbolism, and even in his landscapes his palette seemed to deliberately avoid true tones in favor of otherworldly exaltations of light and shadow.
Legacy
A successful and influential artist in his day, Davies’ reputation has receded somewhat with time, though his works are in the collections of many major American museums. Arthur B. Davies died on October 24, 1928 in Florence, Italy, and while his two wives did finally become aware of each other after his passing, the artful Arthur most likely took a few other romantic secrets to his grave.
Sources
- The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies -- Bennard B. Perlman (State University of New York Press--Albany, 1998)
- Arthur B. Davies -- Butler Institute of American Art
- American Salons -- Robert M. Crunden (Oxford University Press, 1993)
