THE PLACE I HAD BEEN LOOKING FOR:
by Karen Wilkin (continued) 

THE GLOUCESTER INFLUENCE (continued)

Gloucester Street, 1916

avis first came to Gloucester in 1915, with his sculptor mother and his younger brother, Wyatt, on the advice of John Sloan, who Davis said "used to rave" about the place;[5] that first summer, the Davises shared a house just above Rocky Neck with Sloan, his wife Dolly, and another artist couple, Alice Beach Winter and her husband, Charles.

(It is worth noting that in the "official" version of his history, the autobiographical notes first published in 1945, Davis fails to mention that he came to Gloucester accompanied.) Sloan, who exhibited with Henri in The Eight, as the Ashcan School painters were properly known, was an established family friend of the Davises. Like many of The Eight, he had done illustrations for Davis's father, a newspaper art editor, when they all lived in Philadelphia. Despite the difference in their ages, Davis and Sloan seem to have become close during the younger man's studies at Henri's school. Sloan's example is visible not only in Davis's early Ashcan School–type city scenes, with their rows of windows and painted signs, but also in the younger man's espousal of his mentor's Socialist politics. Davis agreed, as well, with Sloan's estimate of Gloucester. He liked the place so much that he returned almost every summer until 1934, often staying on well into fall, painting in and around the town and exploring the immediate region in search of motifs. In their first years, Davis and his family rented accommodations in East Gloucester, but in 1925 his parents acquired a house on Mount Pleasant Avenue. Helen Davis later established a sculpture studio on Reed's Wharf and became a nearly year–round Gloucester resident. Her son maintained a painting studio in the family house until the mid–1930s and participated in local exhibitions for many years.

Enthusiastic as Davis was about Gloucester, he seemed to regard it differently than other artists associated with the place at the time. Even his most recognizable images are not the usual picturesque scenes of coastal scenery, boat–filled harbors, and charming towns associated with the local artists' colony.

Gloucester Harbor, 1919

From the start Davis's Gloucester pictures were decidedly experimental. The earliest attest to his effort to carry out the resolution "to become a 'modern' artist"[6] that he made after seeing the celebrated 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. Better known as the Armory Show, this vast gathering of recent, daring European painting and sculpture provided a generation of Americans, both laymen and artists (including Davis) with their first direct encounter with a broad cross section — and large quantities — of modernist art. Artists and art students, Davis recalled, were either violently pro or con.[7] He was violently pro. Thanks to Henri's teaching, he was already attuned to non–traditional subject matter — "ideas and emotions about the life of the time" — and to treating his motifs loosely and with heightened color. In fact, Davis was represented in the exhibition; five of his Ashcan–style watercolors had been accepted for the juried American section of the show, which a young painter might understandably have construed as confirmation of his direction, but when he was confronted by the Armory Show's spectacular selection of radical works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Duchamp, Picasso, Braque, and their colleagues, Davis recalled, "I sensed an objective order in these works which I felt was lacking in my own. It gave me the same kind of excitement I got from the numerical precisions of the Negro piano players."[8]