VAM galleries including this work:
Clara M. Eagle Gallery, Murray State University | World of the Spirit || VAM Home

This etching depicts five simply rendered nudes lined up, presumably waiting to be baptized.

About the Artist

Printmaker, painter, and tapestry designer Arthur Bowen Davies was born in Utica, New York, in 1862. His family later moved to Chicago, where Davies studied at the Chicago Academy of Design from 1879 to 1882. After working as a draftsman for a civil engineering firm in Colorado and then in Mexico City, Davies decided to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. After a brief enrollment at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1880s, he moved to New York, where he studied at both the Art Students League and the Gotham Art Students League. In 1893, he made his first of many trips to Europe, where, among other things, he studied the works of Dutch Realism.

In 1908, Davies participated in a landmark exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York as one of “The Eight,” the group of artists who founded the Ashcan school of realism. Although Davies’ style was more whimsical and less realistic than his fellow exhibitors’, the show was their collective reaction against the conservative standards of the National Academy of Design. In 1913, Davies organized and participated in an even more groundbreaking exhibit known as the Armory Show, which is hailed as the event that brought Modernism to the United States.

While his reputation in the art community progressively fell to the wayside after his death in 1928, Arthur B. Davies was a greatly respected and collected artist during his lifetime, and his role in ushering in the age of Modern art was indispensable.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: Does this scene look like your idea of a baptism? How does the lack of shading affect the piece? Is there any repetition in the work? How did the title affect your perception of the work? Do you think Baptism refers to a literal or figurative christening in this instance? Notice the body language of the individual figures. What do their stances suggest about their personalities or states of mind?

Activity: In this work of art, Davies has paid attention to only the most important forms of the body. The figures are rendered with quick, confident lines. Find a partner and take turns alternately drawing and posing. Set a timer for two minutes at the start of each pose. Using vine charcoal and drawing paper, try to capture your partner’s form using the fewest necessary lines. Pay attention to proportion. And remember: Because this is an exercise about lines, avoid the use of shading. Such brief sketches, which are often used as warm-up exercises by artists, are called “gesture drawings.”

List and practice the kinds of lines you see in this drawing. Make up your own type of line and use it in a drawing.

Links

Read Hyde Collection Art Museum director Randall Suffolk’s essay Arthur B. Davies: Dweller on the Threshold and see samples of Davies’ artwork at the Fine Arts Online site.
[www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa630.htm]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 50 images of works by Davies online.
[www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/woa_searchResults.asp?collection=entire&Era1=AD&Date2=&Era2=AD&Artist=Davies]

Get more links to Davies works online in the Artcyclopedia.
[www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/davies_arthur_bowen.html]

Learn about etching and other forms of printmaking, step by step, at the Museum of Modern Art’s What Is a Print? site.
[www.moma.org/exhibitions/2001/whatisaprint/print.html]