Hill Town

After studying art in Chicago, Davies settled in New York, where he worked as an illustrator while building his career as a painter. Davies’s work attracted the attention of department-store magnate Benjamin Altman, who sent him to Italy in 1893 to further his training. Davies would return to Europe frequently throughout his life, and was traveling in Italy when he died. Starting in 1900, Davies produced lyrical, imaginative landscapes that often included classical or allegorical references. In this evocative pastel, he uses a vivid palette applied with broad strokes to suggest the distant landscape and unidentified hill town, revealing his debt to the ethereal and expressive Tonalist landscapes of George Inness (1825–1894).