Ronald Davis (also Renald)

One of the most esteemed booksellers on Paris’s Right Bank, the English publisher Ronald Davis sold manuscripts and rare books while also maintaining contacts with the Parisian avant-garde and circles around Guillaume Apollinaire and André Malraux. His art collection ranged from nineteenth-century first-edition books to early twentieth-century drawings by Auguste Rodin to Cubist works by Louis Marcoussis and Pablo Picasso.

Davis was born to Herbert and Ailey Solomon Davis and went to England for his early education. He eventually moved to Paris before the First World War in order to teach, but soon began working as a translator and publisher. His earliest translations, of poems by Francis Carco, date to 1920. In 1921 he opened a bookstore, Ronald Davis et Cie, at 173 Rue de Courcelles. One of his most important high profile clients was Miriam de Rothschild. She was key to Davis’s success as a bookseller and presumably the reason for moving his bookstore (by 1924) to 160 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in a more fashionable neighborhood near the Champs Élysées and closer to Rothschild’s residence. Other illustrious customers included Jacques Doucet and Edward W. Titus, a Polish-born publisher and book dealer.

As a publisher, Davis admired the work of Charles Baudelaire, Armand Massard, Arthur Rimbaud, Stendhal, and Paul Valéry, whose La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (The Evening with Mr. Teste) he translated into English. In 1924, he published Un Coeur sous une soutane: Intimités d’un séminariste (A Heart under a Cassock: Intimacies of a Seminarian) with a preface by Louis Aragon and André Breton. Davis also enlisted the editorial services of Malraux for at least three of his publications and managed the international revue Commerce (1924–32) during the first year of its publication.

Little known as an art collector, Davis commissioned his portrait from Marcoussis in the early 1920s. The painting (ca. 1924; location unknown) was included in the Salon des Tuileries in Paris in the summer of 1924. Other works by Marcoussis in Davis’s collection include a work on paper study for Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (1912; Art Institute of Chicago) that the artist dedicated to the collector. Davis also owned one of the six painted bronzes from Picasso’s groundbreaking Glass of Absinthe series (1914; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), which he may have acquired during the first Galerie Kahnweiler sequestration sale in June 1921. Davis acted as a book expert during sales at the Hôtel Drouot in the late 1920s; it was there, in a sale of actor and director Sacha Guitry’s collection on April 27, 1929, that he purchased two still lifes by Marcoussis.

After his death, Davis’s wife Camille Marie Josephine Morel continued to operate the business as Chez Mme Ronald Davis at 12 Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt, and later enlisted the help of bookseller Maurice Chalvet to manage the operation. While the art collection transferred to Camille at Ronald’s death, details of its whereabouts after her death in 1973 are little known; in 2014 some of the drawings by Rodin resurfaced at the Hôtel Drouot.