Picture Vale of Tempe of a Young Girl by American painter Arthur B. Davies

The ingenuity of Mr. Arthur B. Davies invention invests his painting with unusual interest. His landscape presents many original and engaging patterns in which the imagination threads secret pathways of delight and his figure pieces delicately suggest in design ideas that are frequently as unsubstantial as dreams and as lovely. The eclecticism that is evident in his work in no wise interferes with the individual taste observable in its elaboration or the personal quality of its appeal. Many of later canvases by American painter Arthur B. Davies are attractive illustrations of moments of classic enchantment shepherds piping to their flocks upon the heights of Parnassus, nymphs dancing in the painting Vale of Tempe, or maybe a group of unicorns gravely regarding some unfamiliar vista of terrestrial grandeur. Keats’ description of the relief upon the Grecian Urn is the immortalization of that significant beauty one glimpses in his paintings. His earlier canvases are generally richer in color than his later works and embody a more humble and more human and therefore more understandable presentation of various manifestations of life illuminated with a touch of recognizable realism. Their spontaneity is too obvious to allow of their escaping attention and their rare simplicity too intriguing to permit of their being neglected for the more calculated and hence more compelling effectiveness of his subsequent creations.