Charles Harold Davis was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in 1856.  Davis' youthful interests included music, art, and literature, and by his early teens he had become an avid draftsman. In 1877, he enrolled in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied drawing for two years under the German artist Emil Otto Grundmann (1844-1890). Davis then spent a year in Amesbury doing portraits and painting landscapes inspired by an exhibition of French Barbizon paintings in Boston. A wealthy Amesbury carriage manufacturer, Jacob R. Huntington, took an interest in Davis' work, and offered him one thousand dollars to finance further study in Paris.

In September of 1880, Davis and Edward Simmons, a friend from his Boston art school days who would later become a member of "The Ten," sailed for Paris to enroll in the Acad�mie Julian. Davis studied under Gustave Boulanger and Julius Lefebrve, but soon decided to leave the academy and moved to the Barbizon region outside of Paris, where he would concentrate on landscape painting. Within a few months he had completed a large landscape that was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon in May of 1881. Encouraged by his success at the Salon, Davis settled in the village of Fleury near Barbizon, where the flat, open countryside bears a striking resemblance to the tidal lands and meandering marsh rivers of his native Amesbury. During the summers Davis was joined in Fleury by a number of artist friends from Boston, including Charles Henry Hayden (1856-1901), Charles Herbert Barnard (1855-1909), and Gaines Ruger Donoho (1857-1916). It was also in Fleury that he met and married Angele Genevieve Legarde in 1884. Later settling in Saint-Leger in Normandy, Davis remained in France for ten years, exhibiting each year at the Salon, where he won honorable mention in 1887.  

Davis would become one of the most highly respected and original interpreters of Tonalist landscape painting in the 1880's. His works were admired by his colleagues, promoted by the leading dealers of his day, and actively sought by major collectors and museums. The Tonalist landscapes and subtle twilight scenes that he sent home sold so well that he was able to stay abroad for a decade, a success which few young American artists could claim.    

Davis returned to America in 1890, at the age of 34. After visiting Amesbury, he settled in the seaside village of Mystic, Connecticut in the autumn of 1891. Davis chose Mystic for its picturesque hills and forests, which reminded him of Barbizon, and because of its central location on the train line between his Boston and New York galleries.  

Davis continued to paint in the quiet, poetic, tonalist style of his French landscapes until about 1894. By 1900 his style had changed dramatically, and his focus had shifted from a concentration on the land to the sky. His tonalist skies had been softly glowing planes that silhouetted the low-lying landscapes; his Impressionist skies were brilliant cobalt or ultramarine blue, within which monumental cumulus clouds floated, creating dramatic shapes and vivid color contrasts that endowed the scenes with the characteristic Impressionist sense of the momentary.

Davis preferred plein air painting, working directly from nature, and in the present work one can sense an immediacy in his method, with his vigorous and broadly painted strokes. Executed with a sensitive, painterly touch, Davis' landscapes from this period have a beautiful simplicity. When viewed up close, one senses a kinetic energy in his loose, yet forceful brushstrokes, which appear to be as much about an energetic expression as a naturalistic representation. When viewed from the proper distance, however, the viewer is impressed with a dramatic and vivid sense of reality, an ability and a quality which truly distinguishes Charles Harold Davis as one of America's most brilliant and original landscape artists.