Design and Art Australia Online

painter, was born in Cornwall, son of an Anglican clergyman, Rev. W.H. Davies. According to Mallalieu, Henry Casson (or Cassom) Davies was employed in 1851 as drawing master at Hull College in Yorkshire, although McCulloch states: 'After a roving life spent mostly in the U.K., he was commissioned by the British government “to record in words and pictures the colony of Victoria”’. He was presumably the H. 'Davis’ who exhibited two works with the Victorian Fine Arts Society in 1853, Thames, near Somerset House, by Night and Landscape . The following year (as Davies of Junction Street, St Kilda) he showed four works at the Melbourne Exhibition: Highland Snow Storm , An Australian Dust Storm , A Summer’s Day at Windermere and Wreck on the Fern Islands . All were stated to have been 'done in the colony, and are therefore, par excellence , Victorian’. Indeed, the Argus reviewer thought it improbable that, in comparison with Davies, Melbourne would ever 'be able to boast of undoubted and superior genius in an art like painting’. Two years later he contributed a large group of watercolour paintings of both Scottish and Australian subjects to the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art, Bridge over Saltwater River and Church and Schools, St. Kilda (a view of the proposed Protestant Church and schools) being jointly exhibited with the Melbourne architect and civil engineer Charles R. Swyer, their designer.

Between 1855 and 1868 Davies was represented at most of the major art exhibitions in Victoria although he is not always readily identified: it is likely, for example, that Lagoon Scene at Sunrise , exhibited by R.F. Norton at the Geelong Mechanics Institute in 1857 as the work of 'Davis’, was his. He showed views of Scotland, England and Tasmania with the Victorian Society of Fine Arts that year, most for sale from £25 to £80 each. The Tasmanian views were a product of a recent tour and he may have revisited the island on sketching trips. The five Tasmanian works he showed in the 1860 Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts, however – with the exception of The Punch Bowl, near Tasmania – had all been exhibited previously.

In February 1858 the Age noted that an art union of Davies’s watercolours was about to be drawn at Reed & Co.'s shop in Collins Street. A View of the Yarra was on view at Mr Maclachlan’s in Collins Street in May 1859 when three British works – St Michael’s Mount Cornwall , The Lost Track and Glen Athol in Perthshire – could be seen at Joseph Wilkie’s music shop. Other watercolours, including Fern Tree Gully , were shown at the 1863 and 1869 Ballarat Mechanics Institute exhibitions.

In 1858 Davies married Emily Frances Davis. Soon afterwards he was supplementing his income by working as a drawing master at the Church of England Grammar School, St Kilda Road, Melbourne, where by 1866 he was sharing the teaching with A. Dellas . Davies died prematurely in 1868 at his home in Bull Street, St Kilda. His view of St Kilda Beach (1854), probably the same as St Kilda from the Bay by 'Davis’ exhibited at Ballarat in 1863, was shown posthumously in the 1869 Melbourne Public Library Exhibition at which Samuel Calvert showed Davies’s River Scene and A. Fisher, Brogher Loch . Paintings catalogued as by 'Davis’ were probably also his. The Melbourne patron Dr J. Blair of Collins Street lent four of Davies’s paintings from his collection to the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition Preparatory to the Philadelphia Centennial. The inaugural exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1870 included five sketches of New South Wales, Toorak and Scotland by this 'young water-colour draughtsman, named Davis [sic], of great promise but unequal performance [who] gave numerous proofs of genius between 1855 and 1860, but died early, without fulfilling what he was capable of’.

Soon after his arrival in the colony Davies was regarded as the best watercolour painter in Victoria. Reviewing the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art, the Argus stated: 'This gentleman not only selects his views with great judgement, but he represents them under the most poetical aspects and agreeable atmospheric effects’. At the same time My Note Book extolled Davies as a 'poet-painter’ of colonial subjects: 'There is actual, visible, I was almost going to say tangible atmosphere in them’. He strove in his landscapes for evocative, picturesque and sublime atmospheric effects, painting in a broad style that was frequently contrasted to the detailed precision of Chevalier or von Guè rard. Undoubtedly he was influenced by J.M.W. Turner who, with Copley Fielding and other British artists, was said to have admired his work.

In 1856 the Argus summed up Davies’s style as 'characterised by great breadth, and even massiveness. His pencil is bold, vigorous, and free … The morning mist arising from a solitary lagoon—a heavy fog (suffused with a warm flush) brooding over the sea, which is slumbering in a dead calm—a glowing sunset, exhibiting grand contrasts of colour … a waterfall tumbling through a dark ravine, with huge masses of rock interposing their grim and rugged forms between the trees which grow in wild luxuriance from their fissures—mountains looming in misty magnificence through a driving storm of sleet and snow—these are among the subjects selected by Mr Davies for illustration … He seizes upon the broad and salient features of a landscape, and describes them (so to speak) vigorously, expressively, and poetically’.

Increasingly, however, critics felt that Davies’s painting was becoming too generalised. Combined with a non-literal use of colour – a 'chaos of beautiful prismatic extravagances’ – his landscapes were accused of bearing little relation to colonial nature. The Illustrated Journal of Australasia noted in January 1858: 'Mr Davies in colours, is as bold and broad as ever; indeed so much so that he will presently stand in need of an interpreter’. The Argus had previously remarked that he was in danger of 'his strength degenerating into a weakness and of his excellence being exaggerated into a defect’. By 1863 the Illustrated Melbourne Post was positively sarcastic, referring to his 'one indifferent sketch, which a strong imagination may presume to be a coast scene, but which is just as likely to be scrub, heath, scraped up mud, or anything else equally indeterminate and inexpressive’. When Davies showed oils as well as his normal watercolours in 1864, the Argus conceded his 'Turnerish’ aims but thought he had not been successful 'in catching the spirit of the great English master’.

Almost forgotten today, Davies is represented in the La Trobe Library by a watercolour, View on the Yarra, near Richmond , acquired for the Victorian National Collections in 1870. Other works occasionally appear at auction. Evening on the Yarra, Melbourne (1856, w/c) sold at Christie’s for $35 000 in April 1987. Neither watercolour explains his contemporary reputation, the latter supporting an 1872 criticism of 'his stereotyped failing of too much blue’.

Writers:

Lennon, Jane

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011