William Steeple Davis Art

An exceptional antique oil on canvas painting by the Long Island artist William Steeple Davis (1884-1961), the painting depicts the ship "Discovery". The ship Discovery was built in ...

For your consideration a beautiful oil on canvas painting by William Steeple Davis done circa 1920 showing the battle scene of the USS Constitution and the HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812. The USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere, was a single ship action between the two ships which took place 400 miles southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It took place shortly after war had broken out and would prove to be an important victory for American morale. Early in the battle Guerriere's mizzenmast fell overboard as shown in this painting. The painting is signed lower left and titled verso "A Reminder of 1812". He also signed verso on stretcher along with Orient, New York where he spent his entire life. Craquelure throughout but paint is very stable. Unframed. Davis was born on May 7, 1884, and lived his entire life in the small village of Orient, on the eastern tip of the north shore of Long Island. Like many Long Island artists, he used his rural surroundings to further his career as a painter, photographer, and commercial artist. His work has been compared to that of Whitney Hubbard, Irving R. Wiles and Fairfield Porter. But unlike his East End contemporaries, Davis was self-taught and socially isolated; he rarely left Orient and did not travel to Europe until late in life. Despite this, he frequently exhibited his works at both American and international venues, he wrote more than six hundred articles about photography for such magazines as The Camera and Photo Era, and he established a career as a commercial illustrator. (left: Self portrait, 1909, oil on board) In Davis's earliest paintings, dating from 1893 and 1894, he delighted in depicting the sailing ships he saw on Long Island Sound. With no formal training and much persistence, he strove to define himself as an artist and tried to continue the tradition of marine and landscape painting developed by his 19th-century predecessors Thomas Birch, Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer. His 1912 work Winter Afternoon is a good example of a painter trying to hold on to 19th-century realism in an age when modernism and abstraction were becoming the dominant styles of American painting. (left: Sunset, 1910, pastel) Davis's graphic works consist primarily of etchings, hand-colored prints and block prints that echo the subject matter of his paintings. His linoleum block prints Horse...

Monogrammed and dated 1904 lower left