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."

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.

– National Gallery of Art

SKU: 70628
Creator: Arthur Bowen Davies
Date: c. 1927
Original Medium: Oil on canvas
Original Size: 40 1/8 × 26 1/16 in.
Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.