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Charles H. Davis: painter of poetic moods

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Thomas Colville

Charles Davis was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, on January 7, 1856. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother a cultivated woman who counted the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) among her friends. Davis's youthful interests included music, art, and literature, and by his early teens he had become an avid draftsman. In 1877 he enrolled in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, where he studied drawing for two years under the German artist Emil Otto Grundmann (1844-1890). He then spent a year in Amesbury drawing portraits and painting landscapes inspired by the French Barbizon artists Jean Francois Millet, Theodore Rousseau, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and Charles Francois Daubigny, whose paintings he had admired in Boston. Jacob R. Huntington, a wealthy Amesbury carriage manufacturer, took an interest in Davis's work and gave him one thousand dollars to finance further study in Paris.

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In September 1880 Davis and Edward Emerson Simmons (1852-1931), a friend from his Boston art school days, sailed for Paris to enroll in the Academie Julian. Davis soon found the dry exercise of drawing from casts unappealing, however, and, after a trip to the forest of Fontainebleau, he decided to leave the academy and concentrate on landscape painting. Within a few months he had completed a large landscape that was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon in May 1881. The painting is now unlocated, but Davis's subsequent work suggests that he had already assimilated the cool palette, soft, rich surface, and facile brush strokes typical of such prominent contemporary realist painters as Jean Charles Cazin (1841-1901) and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884).

In the summer of 1881, encouraged by his success at the Salon, Davis settled in the village of Fleury near Barbizon, where the flat, open countryside bears a striking resemblance to the tidal lands and meandering marsh rivers of his native Amesbury.(3) During the summers, Davis was joined in Fleury by Charles H. Hayden (1856-1901), Gaines Ruger Donoho (1857-1916), and John Austin Sands Monks (1850-1917), among other artist friends from Boston. And it was in Fleury that he met and married Angele Genevieve Legarde in 1884. Davis remained in France for ten years, exhibiting each year at the Salon, where he won an honorable mention in 1887. He also received a silver medal for his submission to the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889. Concurrently, he participated in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition, he had one-man shows at the Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston and at several galleries in New York City.

A measure of Davis's rapid success can be judged from the following review in the Boston Transcript of his first large one-man exhibition, held in New York City in 1887. Under the headline "The Remarkable Success of a Boston Artist," the reviewer wrote:

The pictures of Mr. C. H. Davis have made a "hit"...the average of the sales has been higher than that of the [recent] auction sales of American pictures, and the total has been larger than that of any special exhibition outside of the auction rooms either this year or last, to the best of my remembrance. At the Chase sale 123 pictures and studies brought about $10,000, an average of $81. At the Whittredge sale 75 pictures and studies were sold for $11,905, an average of $158....There are 53 pictures and sketches by Mr. Davis in the collection at Reichard's gallery, and of this number nearly half have been sold thus far for over $6,000, and the average price is over $200.(4)

A few years after Davis's debut at the Paris Salon, the critic Clarence Cook (1828-1900) placed the thirty-two-year-old painter among a select group of young artists whose

landscape-art... while it grows out of a long and affectionate study of the facts of nature, breathes through them the spirit of poetry and transfigures them to her image. We welcome this poetic interpretation wherever we meet it among our artists...for this has been from the first the one thing most lacking in the art of our Americans.(5)

Davis's works were admired by his colleagues, promoted by the leading dealers of his day, and actively sought by major collectors and museums. In 1886 Inness and Alexander Helwig Wyant (1836-1892), members of the hanging committee of the National Academy of Design, praised Davis's entry, Deepening Shadows, and tried to "secure for it the post of honor."(6) The New York City collector George Ingraham Seney (1826-1893) bought Davis's 1886 Paris Salon entry, Evening (Pl. IV), to give to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Davis's entry the following year, Last Reflections (Pl. I), was purchased for the then-considerable sum of two thousand dollars by a group of patrons and given to the Union League Club in New York City. In 1892 Thomas Benedict Clarke (1848-1931), the patron and promoter of Winslow Homer and Inness, took seventy-five of Davis's works to exhibit at his Art House, a combined gallery-museum in New York City.

Charles H. Davis: painter of poetic moods

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Thomas Colville

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