Warren B. Davis

A short biographical and critical summary of the life and work of Warren Burnham Davis, an American artist of the 19th & 20th Centuries, along with examples of his work.

BIOGRAPHY

Warren Burnham Davis (American, 1865-1928) was a commercial illustrator and fine artist active during the last decades of the 19th Century and the first decades of the 20th. Davis was born in New York and studied at The Art Students League (founded 1875), a fine arts academy whose faculty and advisory board included such leading artists as Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Kenyon Cox, J. Alden Weir, and William Merritt Chase. Davis came of age during the 1880s when new mass market periodicals grew up among the newspaper printing trades located in Lower Manhattan: The Century (1881), The Ladies World (1886), Collier’s (1888) Life, (1897), Saturday Evening Post (1897), Vogue (1909), and most importantly, Vanity Fair (1913). Davis, a successful professional artist, provided editorial art, commercial illustration, and fine art to many of these periodicals and private clients up until his death in Brooklyn in 1928.

CAREER

Much of Davis’ early commercial work was editorial art for general interest magazines targeting female readers. He was one of many commercial and fine artists of the period who helped redefine the status and social stance of women in Gilded Age society. Others, like James Montgomery Flagg (American, 1877-1960), Howard Chandler Christy (American, 1872-1952), and Charles Dana Gibson (American, 1867-1944) depicted the new American woman as an intelligent, independent, and most of all, authoritative presence in post-war America following the armistice of World War I. A skilled draughtsman, Davis also painted formal portraits, sentimental genre scenes, and other commissioned fine art for private clients.

During World War I, Frank Crowninshield (American, 1872-1947), the first editor of Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair (1913-1939) commissioned Davis to produce illustrated cover art. Davis’ Vanity Fair covers depicted sylph-like figures, imaginatively styled as ‘woodland nymphs’, dancing, jumping, or flying in outdoor settings . This series of Vanity Fair covers (Numbers 1/17, 1/18, 2/18, 9/18, 2/20, 9/20, 8/21, 10, 21, 8/24, 2/25, and 5/26) recalled both the graphic work of Troy Kinney (American, 1871-1938), a highly regarded artist known for his intaglio prints of ballet dancers and acrobatic sprites,; and the Symbolist paintings of Arthur Bowen Davies (American, 1862-1928), a preeminent society painter and principal organizer of the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.

Today Davis is best known for his limited edition figure studies of idealized young women commissioned and published by Francis H. Robertson, a leading New York art dealer.[1] This series, described as “A Portfolio of Nudes and Dancing Figures”, was offered for sale in New York and London in an edition of 100 impressions.

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His treatment of his subjects considers how the human body composes itself while standing, sitting, kneeling, crouching, or lying down, unmediated by any historic, mythic, or philosophical associations based on classical references or culture.[2]

INFLUENCES

Davis’ figurative work was influenced by a variety of factors, not least of which were the 19th Century Neo-Classicists he’d doubtless studied at The Art Students League, men such as Herbert James Draper (British, 1863-1920), John William Waterhouse (British, 1849-1917), and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825-1905). Davis may also have seen the pictorial photography exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. These images, obscured through the use of high-key lighting, soft focus, and visible film grain, were thought to endow their subjects with a more ‘painterly’, and hence more ‘artistic’, character. This was particularly true for the work of photographers like Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) and Anne Brigman (1869-1950). In any case, Davis' work emphasized physical beauty and confidant femininity above all, and perhaps the best way to appreciate the spirit of the age, and Warren Davis’ coy, chaste, and sometimes mirthful woodland nymphs is to hear Vanity Fair’s Frank Crowninshield when he penned the new magazine’s first editorial in 1914:

“Let us instance one respect in which American life has recently undergone a great change. We allude to its increased devotion to pleasure, to happiness, to dancing, to sport, to the delights of the country, to laughter, and to all forms of cheerfulness. This tendency among us has been of late the subject of many parental warnings, admonitory sermons, and somewhat lugubrious editorials. For our part, it seems a bright sign in the heavens, for it argues, we believe, that we, as a nation, have come to realize the need for more cheerfulness, for hiding a solemn face, for a fair measure of pluck, and for great good humor.”[3]

RECOGNITION

Warren Davis was a member of The Salmagundi, the New York fine arts society, and his work is held in the permanent collections of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Princeton University Art Museum, The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, The Huntington Collection, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.