Arthur B. Davies
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Arthur Bowen Davies was an avant-garde artist whose work, reminiscent of 19th-century romanticism, formed a critical bridge between 19th-century European art and 20th-century American modernism. Arthur Bowen Davies was born in Utica, New York, in 1862 and began art from a young age, selling his first sculpture at the age of twelve for twenty-five dollars. He first studied under Dwight Williams, later traveling and being instructed in Chicago, New York City, and Europe. The Macbeth Gallery displayed his first solo exhibition in 1896, and his career grew. In 1908, he exhibited with the modernist art group , The Eight, and was their principal organizer of the 1913 Armory Show. Arthur Bowen Davies rose to be president of the Society of Independent Artists. He carried on a decades-long affair with one of his former models, even living with her in a separate residence under a fake name. His double life remains the most-remembered detail of his personal life. Arthur Bowen Davies died of a heart attack in 1928 while on a trip to Florence. Arthur Bowen Davies was a mystical and creative artist, his work often drawing from his dreams. He most often depicted female nudes, drawing them in fantastical strokes. Although he adopted a cubist style for some years prior to his death, he always returned to romanticism.
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<p>This painting’s lyrical, rhythmic composition is echoed in its title, drawn from a line in "Atalanta in Calydon," Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1865 poem about a virgin huntress in Greek mythology. Despite Arthur B. Davies’s allusion to a specific subject, like many of his works this scene of a female nude against a backdrop of dense, starlit vegetation is highly enigmatic. The figure’s delicate beauty, opalescent skin, and graceful, yet unusual, pose—she might be dancing, floating, or pausing to gaze at the flower near her foot—suggest an ethereal being rather than a real or mythological person. At least one contemporary critic writing for the Christian Science Monitor noted the painting’s mystifying qualities, leading him to describe Davies as the "'American poet painter' [who has] visions and dreams that we cannot always follow."</p>
<p>While depictions of women as otherworldly creatures were not uncommon in late 19th- and early 20th-century American painting, Stars and Dews and Dreams of Night stands apart from works by artists such as Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Abbott Handerson Thayer. It aligns more closely with the allegorical pastoral scenes of the French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione, whose works Davies admired. Among the many works in his own eclectic art collection was a small painting of Venus then attributed to Giorgione that may have provided direct inspiration for the present canvas. The famously reticent and eccentric Davies also was obsessed with attempting to depict the human body at the moment of inhalation, evidenced here in the figure’s uplifted chest and ribcage.</p>
<p>– National Gallery of Art</p>
<p>SKU: 70628<br />Creator: Arthur Bowen Davies<br />Date: c. 1927<br />Original Medium: Oil on canvas<br />Original Size: 40 1/8 × 26 1/16 in.<br />Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.</p>
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