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Bessie Davidson (1879-1965)Bessie Davidson was born in Adelaide on 22 May 1879, daughter of David and Ellen Davidson, nee Johnson. She was educated in Adelaide and first studied there in 1899 under Rose McPherson (later Margaret Preston). After exhibiting with the South Australian Society of Arts in 1901-03 in both the annual and federal exhibitions, she left Adelaide for Europe on 2 July 1904 with Rose McPherson, travelling first to Munich where she enrolled briefly at the Kunsterlinner Verein. She left Munich in November 1904, travelling to Paris with McPherson. In Paris, Davidson attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere where her teachers initially were Raphael Collin and Gustave Courtois, and also the American artist Richard Miller whose light-filled domestic scenes appear to have influenced her work of the 1910s and early 1920s. She became a friend of the Australian artist Rupert Bunny, with whom she is also said to have studied. Another important influence was Lucien Simon with whose family she holidayed in Brittany where she painted some of her first ‘plein air’ scenes. Davidson’s first experience of exhibiting her work in Paris was at the Salon des Artistes Francais (or the ‘Old Salon’) at the Grand Palais in April 1905. She developed a taste for travel and at this time visited different parts of France, as well as Italy, Belgium, England and Scotland, and in 1906 went with McPherson to Morocco and Spain. In December 1906 Davidson returned with McPherson to Adelaide where they leased a studio and gave lessons and exhibited their work. In March 1907 they showed paintings from their two years in Paris. In the following three years Davidson exhibited regularly at the South Australian Society of Arts, her work including still lifes, portraits and landscapes. In 1908 the Art Gallery of South Australia purchased her portrait of fellow artist Gladys Reynell, titled 'Portrait of Miss G.R.'. It is typical of her early formal tonal works. Davidson returned to Paris in 1910, stopping briefly in India en route. Before the outbreak of World War I she also visited Russia. In Paris she became the student of Rene-Xavier Prinet, one of the founders of the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. At the same time she moved into the studio in rue Boissonade in Montparnasse that was to be her home until her death in 1965. Prinet’s classical training in ‘modern’ subjects was to be the underlying influence on her painting throughout her career, combining as it did both discipline and the freedom to experiment and to bring her own essential character to her work. In mid-1914 she returned to Adelaide to see her family, and it was then that she painted her delightful, light-filled domestic scene, 'Mother and Child'. At the outbreak of World War I she returned immediately to Paris, joined the Red Cross and worked throughout the war as a nurse, volunteering first to work with typhoid patients and later becoming the Head Nurse of a ward for the seriously wounded. She was awarded the French ‘Medal of Recognition’ at the end of the war. Except
for the years of both world wars, Davidson exhibited frequently
in Paris at Salons and in mixed shows in private galleries.
She exhibited every year from 1911-1922 with the Salon de la
Societe des Beaux-Arts at the Grand Palais. In 1923 she became
a founding member of the new Salon des Tuileries and continued
to exhibit there annually until 1951. During the 1920s she participated
several times in the Carnegie Institute’s exhibitions in
Pittsburgh and St. Louis in the USA, and in 1943 and 1946 exhibited
with the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts in Scotland. In 1930 Davidson became founding Vice-President of the Society of Modern Women Artists (Femmes Artistes Modernes), a position she held for almost a decade. During the landmark Salon of European Women Artists of 1937 in which Bessie Davidson’s work was represented, the FAM was described by critics as the most important group of women artists in Europe. In 1931 Davidson was appointed Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, the only Australian woman artist ever to achieve this distinction. With the German invasion in May 1940, Bessie Davidson chose to remain in France but managed to escape ahead of the invading forces to south of the demarcation line, first to Chabanais and then in August to Grenoble in the French Alps. where she continued to paint daily. In October 1944, following the liberation of Paris, she returned to her Montparnasse studio where she continued to live and paint for the rest of her life. After
the war she continued her practice of spending certain times
of the year in different places, never travelling without her
little portable paint-box. She spent summers at Villeneuve in
Savoie, where in the mid-20s she began to paint landscapes.
After the war she went instead to her country house at Buchy,
north of Rouen. She often went in Spring to Guethary, a small
French coastal town near the border of Spain where she painted
many scenes of the coast and sea. She regularly visited relatives
in Scotland where she painted many landscapes, but made only
one more trip back to her home in Adelaide, in 1950. Reference |
