Harold C. Davies

Harold C. Davies (American, 1891–1976).

This work is offered unframed.

Harold C. Davies first studied at the Corcoran Institute of Art, to which he was admitted at the age of fourteen. After furthering his studies at the San Francisco Institute of Art, he began his professional career, exhibiting widely and with success throughout the United States, including at the Society of Washington Artists (1908–09), the San Francisco Art Association (1921–31), the Oakland Art Gallery, later the Oakland Museum (1931), Birmingham (AL) Museum (1951) and the Southampton Museum (1959). Davies was granted a solo exhibition at the Fresno Art Gallery (1976), and two posthumous retrospectives; at the Haggin Museum, CA, (1981) and the Huntsville Museum, AL, (1982).

Although Davies achieved both public and critical acclaim in his lifetime, he refused gallery representation. Believing that success would compromise his artistic integrity, he painted in his leisure time while earning his living as a corporate executive. Essentially a post-impressionist artist, he was influenced by Cézanne, Gorky and de Kooning, among others, from whom he derived both his lyrical sense of color, a dramatic compositional sense and his intuitive and gestural attack. Intensely dedicated to his art, Davies kept extensive notebooks and comprehensive sketchbooks in which he developed his own complex artistic theories and Modernist aesthetic philosophy. We are pleased to offer this exquisite small work, dating to circa 1950, by a master of American Modernism.

This painting is accompanied by a copy of "Harold Christopher Davies (1891–1976)" by Thomas Albright & F. Herbert Hoover, the catalog of the 1982 Davies Retrospective at the Haggin & Huntsville Museums of Art.

Signed by estate lower right; estate stamp verso