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National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, founded as a gift to the nation, serves as a center of visual art, education, and culture. Its collection of more than 150,000 paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings spans the history of Western art and showcases some of the triumphs of human creativity. Across 363 days a year, the National Gallery offers a full spectrum of special exhibitions and public programs free of charge.
Located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets along Constitution Avenue NW, the National Gallery of Art campus includes the West Building, East Building, and Sculpture Garden. The West Building, the National Gallery’s first building, opened in 1941, was John Russell Pope’s last design. It houses works from the 11th through the 19th centuries. The East Building is widely considered I. M. Pei’s most ambitious architectural design. It opened in 1978 to house the National Gallery’s collection of modern and contemporary art and temporary exhibitions. A renovation completed in 2016 added 12,250 square feet of new exhibition space, including two soaring tower galleries and a rooftop terrace for outdoor sculpture that overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue.
Location
4th and Pennsylvania Northwest
Washington, District of Columbia
United States
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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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![7216](https://daebyguoajvcw.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/7216-300x241.jpg "<div>This painting demonstrates a domestic scene of the French elite. It is painted in the style of the Impressionists, with its rapid brushstrokes of nature, used to cover a fleeting moment. Gonzalès pays careful attention to the sunlight and its effect on the landscape during a particular time of day. Painted at Dieppe, a locale in Normandy, Nanny and Child was originally exhibited with the name, Miss et bébé. The "miss" would represent the nanny's English heritage; to have a nanny with such a nationality would be a sign of wealth in France. Nanny and Child is an homage to Èdouard Manet's The Railway, with its focus of a young, dream-like nanny, and her charge playing with a fence.<br />SKU: 7216<br />Creator: Eva Gonzalès<br />Date: 1877-1878<br />Original Medium: oil on canvas<br />Original Size: 25 9/16 x 32 1/16 in.<br />Location: National Gallery of Art</div>")
