Isle of Destiny

New York-born Davies trained in Chicago at the Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago, before further study in New York at the Art Students League. While initially committed to realistic landscape, Davies’s style underwent a dramatic change around 1900. Influenced by the stylized Symbolist landscapes of the French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Davies began to create evocative pastoral dreamscapes. "Isle of Destiny" is a fine example of Davies’s mature style. With its figures of all ages disporting themselves in an idyllic landscape, the painting pays tribute not only to the Symbolist movement but also to the Arcadian past as enshrined in classical painting and verse. Nevertheless, the work also is marked by modernist developments. The painter greatly admired the dancer Isadora Duncan, whose revolutionary changes to the physical language of dance may have echoes in the varied rhythms of the figures’ postures. Davies had been connected nominally, if not stylistically, with the revolutionary group of artists known as The Eight, and shortly after this painting was completed, he helped organize the 1913 Armory Show. That landmark exhibition was the first exposure for many Americans to European modern art.