Arthur Bowen Davies
Arthur Bowen Davies ( born September 26, 1863 in Utica, New York, † October 24, 1928 in Florence, Italy) was an American painter of symbolism. He was influenced by the Hudson River School, particularly through the luminists and dream landscape painter George Inness.
Life and work
Davies studied at the " School of the Art Institute of Chicago " from 1879 to 1882. He briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago and moved in 1987 to New York, where he began studying at the Art Students League and Robert Henri and George Benjamin Luks met. From 1888 to 1891 he worked in advertising, where he designed billboards, also he made technical drawings and created illustrations for magazines.
Davies was a member of the group The Eight, a group of painters with five associate members of the Ashcan School: William Glackens (1870-1938), Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953), John French Sloan (1871-1951), and Davies himself, Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Maurice Prendergast ( 1859-1924 ). The group The Eight represented only once in the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908.
In the years 1912-1914 was Davies President of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and in this position in 1913 along with Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach one of the main founders of the Armory Show. Davies, who was a lifelong advocate of abstract art had, Alfred Barr assisted in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After a heart attack in 1923, he traveled to Florence, where he was still a series of romantic images of the landscape of northern Italy painted before he died alone in his studio.
He is known for the ethereal figures in his paintings, a romantic, nostalgic and often possess a mysterious quality. Held small figures he arranged often in front of a dark background, with his pictures get your own poetic mood and a special symbolism.