Sweet Tremulous Leaves, 1922/1923

Arthur B. Davies completed Sweet Tremulous Leaves (1922/1923) in the last decade of his career.[1]  [1]
The date comes from Chester Dale’s purchase records and may have been supplied by Ferargil Galleries. Four years earlier, after a period of experimentation with a cubist-influenced style, Davies had returned to the idealized, romantic representations of female nudes in pastoral settings that he had painted during the first decade of the twentieth century. In this work, two contemplative women hold their arms aloft and seem to drift across the composition as if in a trance. The women are positioned in the extreme foreground of the painting in front of a tree trunk and a distant landscape. The painting’s somewhat cryptic title adds to the mysterious, dreamlike quality of the scene.

The figures in Sweet Tremulous Leaves are similar to the woman in an earlier work, A Measure of Dreams [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Arthur B. Davies, A Measure of Dreams, c. 1908, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of George A. Hearn, 1909. Brooks Wright characterized such paintings by Davies in his biography of the artist:

Typically, his paintings show figures that do not look at or interact with the viewer; their faces are veiled or averted, their eyes half closed, their expressions rapt and trance-bound. So little rooted are they to the ground they seem almost to float. Their action is a mute charade, the meaning of which is unclear. Sometimes it is violent, but more often vaguely erotic. The landscape settings often show evidence of symbolic transformation with a consequent displacement of affect, as when a part of the human body is transmuted into a mountain, a valley, a tree, a tower.[2]  [2]
Brooks Wright, The Artist and the Unicorn: The Lives of Arthur B. Davies (New City, NY, 1978), 114.

Davies studied psychology and was fascinated by dreams. He sometimes used dreams as the stimulus for his paintings, referring back to the notes and drawings that he made upon waking.[3]  [3]
For an extensive examination of this topic, see Emily Willard Gephart, “A Dreamer and a Painter: Visualizing the Unconscious in the Work of Arthur B. Davies, 1890–1920” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014), https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/87536. Davies also found inspiration in poetry. A Measure of Dreams has been linked to George Meredith’s poem “A Faith on Trial” (1885),[4]  [4]
Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864 (New York, 1980), 427. and Sweet Tremulous Leaves may have a source in poetry as well. For instance, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Flowers” (1839) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Isadore” (1845) both contain the phrase “tremulous leaves.”[5]  [5]
The full texts of both poems are published widely, including online. The sixth stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Flowers,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A Maine Historical Society Website, accessed Nov. 14, 2023, https://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=90, reads: Gorgeous flowerets in the sunlight shining,
Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day,
Tremulous leaves, with soft and silver lining,
Buds that open only to decay; The first stanza of Edgar Allan Poe,“To Isadore,” in “Appendix: Poems Attributed to Poe,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, vol. 7, Poems (1902), https://www.eapoe.org/works/harrison/jah07z01.htm, reads: Beneath the vine-clad eaves
Whose shadows fall before
Thy lowly cottage door—
Under the lilac’s tremulous leaves—
Within thy snowy clasped hand
The purple flowers it bore—
Last eve in dreams, I saw thee stand,
Like queenly nymph from Fairy-land—
—Enchantress of the flowery wand,
Most beautiful Isadore!

The setting for Davies’s figures is derived from Greek mythology. Davies had long admired Sir James George Frazer’s comparative study of mythology and religion, The Golden Bough (first published in 1890), and even named his farm in upstate New York after it. The manner in which the upraised arms of the nude women align with the trunk and branches of the tree in Sweet Tremulous Leaves is similar to pictorial representations of the myth of Apollo and Daphne mentioned in Frazer’s text (in the National Gallery of Art’s collection, examples include Apollo Pursuing Daphne and Daphne Changed into a Laurel Tree).

Davies was deeply influenced by the classical art that he saw during a trip to Italy and Greece in 1910 and 1911. This fascination took an esoteric turn in 1922 when he collaborated with archaeologist Gustavus A. Eisen in developing the “theory of inhalation.” As explained by Davies’s biographer Bennard B. Perlman, the artist determined that “the excellence of Greek art was based upon the fact that the thorax, rather than the brain, is the center of emotions, and that the figures depicted in Greek painting and sculpture were consciously shown at the height of inhaling a breath, rather than when exhaling and relaxed.”[6]  [6]
Bennard B. Perlman, The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies (New York, 1998), 316. Eisen testified that the artist “actually set to work and retouched hundreds of his old paintings with comparatively few strokes of his brush, thereby magically as it were infusing new life and new beauty rivaling the best in classical art.” Gustavus A. Eisen and F. Newlin Price, “Obituary: Arthur B. Davies,” Art News 27 (Dec. 22, 1928): 12, quoted in Perlman, 317. For a discussion of his theory, see Robin Veder, “Arthur B. Davies’ Inhalation Theory of Art,” American Art 23 (Spring 2009): 56–77. Sweet Tremulous Leaves was painted at the height of Davies’s interest in the inhalation theory. The figures’ raised chests and ribcages and upstretched arms imply that their bodies are at the apex of breathing in.

The similarities of the women’s appearance, their friezelike positioning on the canvas, and the slight difference in their movements could be read as a representation of sequential motion. Davies was familiar with the photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge (American, born England, 1830 - 1904), and he referred to Muybridge’s use of multiple images of the human figure as “continuous composition.”[7]  [7]
Arthur B. Davies, “Credo,” in The Etchings and Lithographs of Arthur B. Davies, ed. Frederic Newlin Price (New York, 1929), 19, quoted in Robin Veder, “Modern Motives: Arthur B. Davies and ‘Continuous Composition,’ and Efficient Aesthetics,” in Modern Movement: Arthur Bowen Davies Figurative Works on Paper (Lynchburg, 2013), 12, https://www.academia.edu/2916313/Modern_Motives_Arthur_B._Davies_and_Continuous_Composition_and_Efficient_Aesthetics_catalog_essay_for_Maier_Museum_January_2013. See Veder’s essay for a fuller discussion of sequential motion in Davies’s works. Perlman traced the artist’s interest in sequential motion to the earlier pastel Design, Birth of Tragedy (c. 1912, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME), noting that in subsequent works Davies “tended to avoid overlapping figures so that the negative spaces between them could take on added significance.”[8]  [8]
Bennard B. Perlman, The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies (New York, 1998), 226. The unconventional cropping of the figures—a pictorial strategy that Davies used often, as in A Measure of Dreams—also reflects the influence of photography.

Robert Torchia

July 24, 2024