Lot 142: Louis B. Davis (1860-1941)

The Nativity
red ink and bodycolour, heightened with gold, in an arched frame
14 x 10 1/2 in. (35.5 x 26.5 cm.)

London, Barbican Art Gallery, The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer, 1989, no. 53

with Abbott and Holder, London, December 1979.

Louis Davis was a versatile member of the Arts and Crafts community. Though probably best known as a designer of stained glass, he was also a painter and illustrator. He had many patrons among the ecclesiastical establishment, and decorated private chapels for the Duchess of Bedford and the Marquess of Londonderry. He exhibited at the New Gallery and the Royal Water-colour Society and was a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and the Art Workers Guild. He is recorded living at Ewelme Cottage, Pinner, by 1897, and died there at the age of eighty-one.

The present watercolour, dateable to about 1900, is a good example of Davis's ability to evoke a mood of child-like, fairytale innocence. Equally characteristic is a debt to Burne-Jones, who influenced so many artists working in this tradition. In fact Davis may have been thinking of a triptych illustrating scenes from the Nativity that Burne-Jones had painted in 1863 (private collection; the centre panel illustrated in John Christian, The Pre-Raphaelites in Oxford, Oxford, 1974, p. 41). Commissioned by the Dalziel brothers, the famous wood-engravers, the triptych is full of wilfully quaint motifs inspired by early German engravings and the contemporary work of Ludwig Richter. Burne-Jones was currently studying such sources in connection with his contribution to the current movement for better book illustration, a movement with which Dalziels were intimately involved.

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