Museums at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY
631-751-0066
http://www.museumsatstonybrook.org
The Search for the Pictorial: The Life
and Art of William Steeple Davis
The Museums at Stony Brook will showcase
the works of Long Island artist William Steeple Davis in a new exhibition
opening on June 24 and continuing through August 6, 2000. "The Search
for the Pictorial: The Life and Art of William Steeple Davis" features
paintings, photographs and drawings by the East End artist on loan from
the Oysterponds Historical Society.
Davis
was born on May 7, 1884, and lived his entire life in the small village
of Orient, on the eastern tip of the north shore of Long Island. Like many
Long Island artists, he used his rural surroundings to further his career
as a painter, photographer, and commercial artist. His work has been compared
to that of Whitney Hubbard, Irving R. Wiles and Fairfield Porter. But unlike
his East End contemporaries, Davis was self-taught and socially isolated;
he rarely left Orient and did not travel to Europe until late in life. Despite
this, he frequently exhibited his works at both American and international
venues, he wrote more than six hundred articles about photography for such
magazines as The Camera and Photo Era, and he established
a career as a commercial illustrator. (left: Self portrait,
1909, oil on board)
In
Davis's earliest paintings, dating from 1893 and 1894, he delighted in depicting
the sailing ships he saw on Long Island Sound. With no formal training and
much persistence, he strove to define himself as an artist and tried to
continue the tradition of marine and landscape painting developed by his
19th-century predecessors Thomas Birch, Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer. His
1912 work Winter Afternoon is a good example of a painter trying
to hold on to 19th-century realism in an age when modernism and abstraction
were becoming the dominant styles of American painting. (left: Sunset,
1910, pastel)
Davis's graphic works consist primarily of etchings, hand-colored
prints and block prints that echo the subject matter of his paintings. His
linoleum block prints Horse and Buggy Days (1936) and Ploughing
Time (1936) reflect a simpler time when men depended upon the power
of horses, not steam or gasoline power. His best known work, In Tumult
(c. 1927), perhaps best expresses the artist as a talented draftsman and
reflects his love and respect for the power of the ocean.
But it is his photographic works and essays on photography
for which Davis is best known. His first contact with photographic materials
was in 1895 when a friend, Lucien C. Laudy, sent him a magic lantern and
several dozen lantern slides. Within a few years, Davis began to publish
articles in well-known photography journals, and in 1923 he published the
book Practical Amateur Photography. Davis was interested in all aspects
of photography -- artistic, technical, scientific and economic -- and by
his death he had published more than 600 articles on the subject.
A catalogue, written by Dr. Kimberly Rhodes, with an introduction
by Dr. Paul Sternberger, accompanies the show. The exhibition will travel
to Hollins University in Virginia in the fall of 2002.
Funding for the exhibition and accompanying publication
has been provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, Robert Shurhan,
Carole G. Donlin, and the Arts in Southold Town.
Read more about the Museums
at Stony Brook in Resource Library Magazine
Please click on thumbnail images bordered by a red line
to see enlargements.
For further biographical information on selected artists
cited above please see America's Distinguished
Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
This page was originally published in Resource
Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for
more information. rev. 3/2/11
Search Resource
Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.
Copyright 2011 Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit corporation. All rights
reserved.
Davis
was born on May 7, 1884, and lived his entire life in the small village
of Orient, on the eastern tip of the north shore of Long Island. Like many
Long Island artists, he used his rural surroundings to further his career
as a painter, photographer, and commercial artist. His work has been compared
to that of Whitney Hubbard, Irving R. Wiles and Fairfield Porter. But unlike
his East End contemporaries, Davis was self-taught and socially isolated;
he rarely left Orient and did not travel to Europe until late in life. Despite
this, he frequently exhibited his works at both American and international
venues, he wrote more than six hundred articles about photography for such
magazines as The Camera and Photo Era, and he established
a career as a commercial illustrator. (left: Self portrait,
1909, oil on board)