Nine Nudes in a River Landscape

Arthur B. Davies (1862–1928)

1920s

Watercolor on cardboard

Gift of Sewell C. Biggs; 1996.7

Arthur Davies was a key organizer of The Armory Show, America’s first major exhibition of European and American modern masters. As a member of The Eight, Davies was part of a group of Philadelphia and New York artists united by disinterest in the dominant impressionist painting of the early 1900s. Some members of this loose fraternity would later establish the Ashcan School of American Realism, focusing their artistic points of view upon the seedy underside of urban living. The dreamlike visions and ethereal figure studies of Arthur Davies were more closely associated with the movement called symbolism.