Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 12

Arthur Bowen Davies
Standing Female Nude

About the Item

Standing Female Nude Oil on canvas, c. 1910 Signed lower left corner (see photo) Condition: Excellent Housed in a 22K Gold Leaf Frame Canvas size: 24 x 18 1/8 inches Frame size: 30 x 24 inches Provenance: Estate of the artist James Graham & Sons, New York (agent for the artist and his estate) Most probably a finished study for a central figure in a large allegorical painting. Biography Arthur B. Davies’s mystical, mysterious paintings hearken back to 19th-century romanticism, even while Davies aligned himself with American artists advancing the most radical ideals of their day. Davies was born on September 26, 1862, in Utica, New York, the son of English and Welsh parents who had immigrated to the United States in 1856. He first took art lessons as a teenager from a local landscape painter, Dwight Williams. By 1879 Davies's family had moved to Chicago, where he attended the Chicago Academy of Design. He interrupted his studies in the early 1880s to work in New Mexico and Mexico as a draftsman for a railway expansion company. Davies later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then moved to New York City, where he enrolled in the Art Students League. During his first years in New York he supported himself as a magazine illustrator. Davies’s work was shown at the American Art Galleries, the National Academy of Design, and in an exhibition of the American Watercolor Society. After his marriage to the physician Lucy Virginia Meriwether in 1892, Davies moved to a farm in Congers, in upstate New York, and commuted to his studio in the city. Acting on the recommendation of the dealer William Macbeth, the department store magnate Benjamin Altman provided financial support that enabled the young artist to make two trips to Europe. Davies had his first solo exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in 1896. In the early 1900s, Davies began to lead a double personal life: though he remained married and continued to visit his wife and children on weekends, he moved in with Edna Potter, a model and dancer, in New York. They assumed the alias of Mr. and Mrs. David A. Owen and kept their relationship, and their daughter, a secret until Davies’s death. Davies's most distinctive works are the dreamlike, fantasy visions of female nudes standing in pastoral landscapes that he began to paint around 1900. These enigmatic subjects possess a distinctly classical flavor and have literary and mythological allusions. Such works have a strong affinity with symbolism and are often compared with those of the French artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824 - 1898) and Odilon Redon (French, 1840 - 1916). Despite his style and subject matter—which had more of an affinity with the 19th century than the 20th—Davies joined the circle of young, progressive artists who gathered around Robert Henri (American, 1865 - 1929). Davies showed his work with theirs at the historic exhibition of The Eight at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908, and his paintings were included in the Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1910. He became president of the Society of Independent Artists in 1911 and played a pivotal role in organizing the Armory Show in 1913, which introduced Americans to the latest developments in European avant-garde art. Davies’s role as a fierce proponent of modernism in the work of others, rather than in his own artistic practice, was his greatest contribution to the field. After the Armory Show Davies briefly painted in a cubist-influenced style, but soon returned to the idyllic scenes for which he is best known. Davies also experimented with sculpture in a variety of styles and materials, including tapestry, and was an accomplished graphic artist. He served as advisor to the collector Lillie P. Bliss, helping her amass the collection that is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Toward the end of his life he spent extended periods of time in Paris and Florence, Italy. He died of a heart attack in Florence on October 24, 1928. Robert Torchia, Catherine Southwick Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
  • Creator:
    Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928, American)
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 24 in (60.96 cm)Width: 18.13 in (46.06 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Fairlawn, OH
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: FA59071stDibs: LU14015925712

More From This Seller

View All
Nude
By William Wiessler
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Nude Oil on canvas, 1923 Signed and dated lower left: Wm. Wiessler, '23 (see photo) Condition: excellent Canvas size: 24 1/4 x 29 1/4" Frame size: 33 5/8 x 38 5/8" Provenance: Estate of the Artist Radecki Galleries, South Bend Thomas French Fine Art...
Category

1920s American Impressionist Nude Paintings

Materials

Oil

Untitled (Nude in front of light house, Lake Erie)
By Charles Harris ( Beni Kosh )
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Untitled (Nude in front of light house, Lake Erie) Oil on board, 1970 Signed and dated lower right (see photo) Estate Stamp verso, No. 359 (see photo) Condition: Original untouched "...
Category

1970s American Modern Nude Paintings

Materials

Oil

South Spring Wind - Voice of Persephone
By Arthur Bowen Davies
Located in Fairlawn, OH
South Spring Wind - Voice of Persephone Sanguine on paper heightened with white gouache over the entire sheet Signed lower left An important work on paper by the artist with extensiv...
Category

1920s Ashcan School Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gouache

Woman Pulling on a Slip
By Everett Shinn
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Woman Pulling on a Slip Conte on paper, c. 1910 Signed lower right: "E. Shinn" (see photo of legs, signature on right) Provenance: Estate of the Artist (see label) Graham Gallery, N...
Category

1910s Ashcan School Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Conté

Study of an Indian Model
By Arthur B. Davies
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Study of an Indian Model Unsigned Pastel and chalk on blue paper, mounted to support Provenance: Estate of the artist (per Graham and Sons, agent for the estate) James Graham & Sons,...
Category

1920s Ashcan School Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Chalk, Pastel

Man, Wife and Child
By John French Sloan
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Man, Wife and Child Etching, 1905 Signed and titled in pencil by the artist below image (see photo) Annotated in pencil by the artist "100 proofs" Signed and dated in the plate lower...
Category

Early 1900s Ashcan School Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

You May Also Like

"Female Nude, " Edith Glackens Dimock, Ashcan School Figurative Painting
By Edith Glackens Dimock
Located in New York, NY
Edith (Glackens) Dimock (1876 - 1955) Untitled (Female Nude), circa 1915 Oil on canvas 34 1/2 x 28 1/4 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Colle...
Category

1910s Ashcan School Nude Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Orientale
By Henri Fantin-Latour
Located in New York, NY
Signed, lower right: Fantin Provenance: Gustave Tempelaere (1840–1904), Paris; possibly by descent to his son: Julien Tempelaere (1876–1961) and with F. & J. Tempelaere, Paris, prob...
Category

1890s Romantic Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Paper, Oil

Allegory of Fortune
Located in New York, NY
Provenance: S. Spinelli Collection, Florence; their sale, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, July 11-14, 1928, lot 112 (unsold); reoffered Galleria Luigi Bellini, Florence, April 23-26, 1934, lot 132, as manner of Baldassare Peruzzi Dr. Giacomo Ancona, Florence, 1930s, and after 1939, San Francisco; thence by descent to his son: Mario Ancona, San Francisco; thence by descent to his children: Mario Ancona III and Victoria Ancona, San Francisco, until 1995; thence to: Phyllis Ancona Green, widow of Mario Ancona, Los Angeles (1995-2012) Literature: Donato Sanminiatelli, Domenico Beccafumi. Milan 1967, p. 170 (under paintings attributed to Beccafumi) Among the precious survivors of Renaissance secular paintings for domestic interiors are several unusual and particularly attractive panels painted in Siena at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. These paintings depict exemplary figures from antiquity—heroes or heroines, as well as allegorical, literary, and mythological figures. For the most part, these panels have survived in groups of three, although it is possible that some of these works were painted either as part of larger series or as individual projects. One such trio by Beccafumi consists of two paintings now at the National Gallery, London (Marcia and Tanaquil) and a third in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome (Cornelia). These were commissioned around 1517–1519 for the bedroom of Francesco di Camillo Petrucci in Siena and were most likely placed together as elements in the wall decoration (spalliere) or installed above the back of a bench or cassapanca. Another, earlier (ca. 1495–1500), set of three—Guidoccio Cozzarelli’s Hippo, Camilla, and Lucretia (Private Collection, Siena) survives with its original wooden framework—a kind of secular triptych. Judith, Sophonisba, and Cleopatra in the collection of the Monte dei Paschi, Siena, are by an anonymous artist close to Beccafumi called the “Master of the Chigi-Saracini Heroines.” Girolamo di Benvenuto’s Cleopatra, Tuccia, and Portia are dispersed (homeless, Prague, Chambery), and Brescianino’s Faith, Hope, and Charity are in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena. The present painting first appeared in the Spinelli sale in Florence in 1934, at which time it was sold with two panels of identical size and format. Each was catalogued as being by the “manner of Baldassare Peruzzi” and of unidentified subject. Of these, the painting depicting a male figure turned to the right has recently reappeared in a private Italian collection, while the location of the third work, portraying a cloaked figure turned three-quarters left, remains unknown. Our panel depicts the allegorical figure of Fortune. Here she is represented in typical fashion as a nude female figure balanced on a wheel (sometimes called the Rota Fortunae), her billowing drapery indicating that she is as changeable as the wind. The appearance of the Virgin and Child in the cloud at the upper right is an unusual addition to the iconography. The subjects of the two pendant male...
Category

16th Century Old Masters Paintings

Materials

Oil, Panel

Important 17' Century Mythological Painting Diana and Actaeon Oil on Canvas
By Giovanni Battista Viola
Located in Rome, IT
Fascinating mythological story of Diana and Actaeon can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Very important provenance from a royal collection. Fabulous finely carved gilt wood coeval...
Category

17th Century Baroque Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil

Venus with Putti Oil on Canvas with Gilt-wood Frame
Located in Rome, IT
French 19' century painting oil on canvas . Young Venus nude figure surrounded by delicious playing putti . Finely carved and gilt-wood frame of the same period . Measurements w...
Category

Mid-19th Century Romantic Nude Paintings

Materials

Oil

Four Oval Shaped 19' Century Allegorical Paintings
Located in Rome, IT
Set of four delicious putto figures , oval shape oil on canvas . Fine tromple oeil painted frame . Very good original condition.
Category

19th Century Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Recently Viewed

View All