One of the most critically successful landscape painters of the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Harold Davis created works in which nature reflects subjective mood and emotion. Davis was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, the son of a schoolteacher. An avid draftsman by his early teens, he studied drawing for two years at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts school under German artist Emil Otto Grundmann (1844–1890). Davis then spent a year in Amesbury drawing portraits and painting landscapes inspired by the so-called Barbizon School, a group of French landscape artists whose intimate, moody images of scenery around the French village of Barbizon were greatly admired in Boston.
In 1880, Davis went to Paris and enrolled in the Académie Julian, an art school popular with Americans, but he quickly tired of drawing from plaster copies of antique statuary, then standard training for artists. After a visit to the nearby romantic forest of Fontainbleau, favored by the Barbizon artists, he began to focus on landscape painting. Soon he had produced a large work that was accepted for the Paris Salon, a prestigious annual exhibition. Encouraged by his success, Davis settled near Barbizon in the village of Fleury-en-Bière, where he found flat, open scenery reminiscent of his native coastal Massachusetts. Other Boston painters often joined him there. Typically devoid of narrative or action, Davis’s paintings rendered quiet rural scenes, often at sunset, in harmonious tones that evoke a subjective emotional response.
Davis married a Frenchwoman and remained in Europe for a decade, during which he participated with great critical success in the Paris Salons, in international expositions, and in several important annual exhibitions in the United States. His landscapes were also seen in galleries in New York and Boston and were acquired for major American public collections, notably New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Returning to the United States in 1890, Davis eventually settled in the seaside village of Mystic, Connecticut, a site that offered plentiful subjects for painting as well as easy access to New York and Boston. He also painted in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts and the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
Davis turned to teaching in the late 1890s and became a core figure of the art colony that developed in Mystic. Around 1895, he had begun to use the lighter colors and more animated brushwork associated with impressionism, in which individual strokes of pure color capture the transient effects of bright outdoor light. Cloudscapes increasingly became important elements of his compositions. Through his teaching and painting in Mystic, Davis helped develop American impressionist landscape painting, a mode distinct from its French precedents in its emphasis on emotion and reverie. As late as the 1920s, Davis continued to experiment in his paintings, but his works were always well received. Awarded numerous awards and honors, he was esteemed throughout his career as a master of the poetic landscape.
