David DAVIES

Australian 1864–1939
worked throughout Europe 1890–93, 1897–1939

Born in Ballarat, Victoria, David Davies studied under Frederick McCubbin and G. F. Folingsby at the National Gallery School from 1887 to 1890 and in 1888 won the student prize for landscape painting with A hot day, 1888 (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria). In 1890 Davies travelled to Europe, studying in Paris and St Ives, Cornwall, a popular artists’ colony where the predominant style eschewed a soft, Whistlerian tonality. Returning to Melbourne in 1893, Davies settled at Templestowe, near Heidelberg, and during the following four years he completed a series of hazy images of the landscape under twilight effects.

John Dougherty is a rare and unique figurative subject in Davies’s work of the period. It is one of three paintings that the artist included in the Winter Exhibition at the Victorian Artists’ Society in May 1895. Another, Twilight, 1895 (National Gallery of Victoria), was equally priced at £10.10.0 (ten guineas), and both works received attention in contemporary reviews:

Mr. Davies also exhibits the head of an old man, painted in the open air, whose face is partly concealed by his battered felt hat, which throws a soft shadow across the rugged face. The head is characterised by the same qualities which are pre-eminent in Mr. Davies’ landscape, simplification of details, perfectly observed values and the subtle quality called sentiment.1

In contrast to the artist’s sombre, nocturnal landscapes, John Dougherty depicts a bright, sunlit subject. Davies’s distinct technique of thick paint, applied in broad, irregular strokes, evocatively captures the rough features of a local figure, whilst simultaneously offering a glimpse of the bush landscape in the background. The perceived sketchiness of Davies’s composition led some critics to conclude that although the portrait was ‘full of strength’, it remained ‘unfinished’.2

Davies returned to Europe with his young family in 1897. The paintings he produced in Melbourne during these brief years remain a high point in his career and his most enduring legacy to the history and development of Australian art.

1 Age, Melbourne, 10 May 1895, p. 6.

2 Table Talk, Melbourne, 10 May 1895, p. 7.

Geoffrey Smith