Harry Davis – Select Artworks at Fine Estate Art

Time is Running Out, Harry Davis  at Fine Estate Art

Harry Emeritus.

Fine Estate Art, located just north of downtown on Talbot Street, is presenting a selection of large paintings, pen and ink and graphite drawings, prints and other works by a well-known Indianapolis artist, in the show Harry A. Davis (1914 – 2006), Snapshots.

Spanning decades, the art career of Davis began in Indianapolis when he graduated from Herron School of Art in 1938. His painting Harvest Dinner won him Prix de Rome honors that allowed for his study in Rome in the time just before America's involvement in World War II. 

Davis would go on to serve in the war in North Africa, both designing camouflage and as a combat artist. As a result of the latter, many of his artworks of this period are held in the collection of the Pentagon.

At war's end, Davis would return to Indianapolis and begin teaching painting and drawing at Herron School of Art from 1946 until 1983, retiring as Professor Emeritus. 

His major artistic legacy is his contemporary realist paintings of Indiana architectural landmarks, many painted just before the planned demolition of the buildings. His signature mature-period style displays a nuanced play of light and shadow over the architectural lines and details of his subject buildings. This technique of brushwork can offer an amazingly varied result from painting to painting, due to his expert capture of the time of the season or the daylight hour.

His major local exhibitions during his lifetime included My City, 1972, which was a special exhibit of Indiana landmarks for the 150th anniversary of the State, and Here and There, 1983, a traveling exhibit that compared the architecture of Indiana and Italy. 

In 2024, Indiana Landmarks held a major retrospective, The Art of Harry Davis.

A Biography in Art.

The current showing of Harry Davis pictures at Fine Estate Art covers two major periods of his creative life, with snapshots showing primarily the people, in figure groups, during the war time, and later, the houses, buildings and street scenes that fascinated him during his middle age onward. 

There are many examples of his artwork from the war years, mostly originals and some limited edition prints as well as several fine examples of the large architectural paintings for which he is most known. 

Follies, Harry Davis

Although not dated, the graphite drawing Follies may represent a scene from his pre-war time in Italy, or perhaps some moment of R&R during the war. The busy, festive scene of 15 or more figures including the signature dancing girls, recalls the celebratory mood and jam-packed happiness also seen in his early award winning Harvest Dinner, already referenced.

The subject matter of many other works clearly places them as being produced during Davis' time in the service. Welcome the Liberators shows a group of weary partisans resting on and about an Army truck. One clearly exhausted, leans on his rifle and the truck's fender. The style of the pen and ink drawing is fluid yet sure, capturing the brief moment of relief after a fight.  The Canteen Quartet, a pen and ink drawing, shows four uniformed buddies, joined in a song at the ledge of a bar. A wonderful drawing in a dynamic regionalist manner, the soldiers are are drawn together by the placement of their arms and the circle of light in the picture. A beer bottle and and aperitif glass, are their only audience. 

Treatment Tent, Harry Davis

Treatment Tent, another pen and ink, shows a prone soldier receiving aid to an injured arm while walking wounded sit nearby, talking among themselves, seemingly numb to the carnage.

The several large paintings include Time is Running Out, 1992, (top of page) a high-noon view of a row of two-story  red brick buildings on Indiana Avenue slated for demolition.  Boarded storefronts and broken windows signal the fate of the two buildings, joined in their fate behind a barricade of barrels, and beneath a web of drooping telephone wire.  Across the street, a parking meter – showing time expired. 

The Black Curtain Theater, Harry Davis

This painting is in the Harry Davis sub-genre of pictures he painted to preserve the image of buildings destined for change or demolition. It is a type that is also seen in his The Black Curtain Theater, 1983, shown in the 69th Annual Indiana Artists exhibition at Indianapolis Museum of Art. Coincidentally, the theater on Talbot Street, was across the street to Fine Estate Arts' location today.  

Benton House, Harry Davis on loan to Irvington Historical Society

But back to the present exhibit, a classic, stately portrait of a historical building is seen in Bates-Hendricks House. The piece is of the same matter-of-fact, frontal composition seen in many, but certainly not all, of his house pictures. He has a similar picture, Benton House, (above) now on display at the Irvington Historical Society exhibition of art in their collection, at Bonna Thompson Center. 

Reilly Industries, Harry Davis

The Fine Estate Art selection includes several widely different variations on this theme, though, in the other large pieces on display. Reilly Industries, 1996, shows the pink light of setting sun slanting over the complex array of pipe tracks, risers and storage silos at the west-side industrial facility. 

Pennsylvania Lines Parking is a painting of an unlikely corner of downtown just south of Washington Street. It's all concrete and asphalt and sky. It's filled out with a few cars, some zigzagging stairs, and a circular yellow-painted curb. Like in the Reilly painting, it's the play of the light that provides a strange, quiet grandeur and beauty to a scene otherwise overlooked or downright unlovely.

Mark Diekhoff, December 2025

See also: 

The Art of Harry Davis (You Tube) 

https://www.facebook.com/FineEstateArt/

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