User:Roomsmoody1924/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clara Davidge, n.d., Ridgely Torrence Papers, Princeton University Library.

Clara Sidney Potter Davidge (1858–1921) was an American art gallerist, patron, interior designer, and spiritualist. Davidge administered a New York gallery called Madison Art Gallery at 305 Madison Avenue, which opened in 1909. At the time it was the only gallery in New York to exclusively carry the work of American artists. [1]

When the Madison Art Gallery closed in 1912, Davidge was already involved with organizing and fundraising efforts for what was to become known as The Armory Show of 1913. Many of the artists who would become both officers and exhibitors in the Armory Show had also exhibited at the Madison Art Gallery, and the early meetings of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, who organized the Armory Show, were held at the gallery. The Madison Gallery hosted Armory Show organizer Walt Kuhn's first solo exhibition in 1911, during which he met, through journalist Frederick Gregg, lawyer and art collector John Quinn. Quinn was to become both the legal advisor of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, as well as being a patron of Kuhn's work and important collector of work exhibited at the Armory Show.

Davidge had early exposure to the art world, as her father, Bishop Henry C. Potter was also an art collector and patron of the arts.

She died in 1921 as Clara Potter Taylor, after drowning in shallow water in a pond near her home in St. James, Long Island. Her obituary stated that "She was paralyzed in one leg, and this accounts for the fact that she was unable to extricate herself from the shallow water into which she probably fell while trying to walk about alone without the aid of a crutch."

A statement about her role in the art world of her era which noted that "Mrs. Taylor was devoted to art with a singleness of heart that is unusual [...] And this love of art she made a force, a turning her energy, her flaming enthusiasm, into helping painters" was signed by George Bellows, D. Putnam Brinley, Walt Kuhn, Ernest Lawson, Elmer Livingston MacRae, Jerome Myers, and Allen Tucker.[2]

  1. ^ "Christine I. Oaklander, Clara Davidge's Madison Art Gallery: Sowing The Seed for The Armory Show, Journal of the Archives of American Art, 1996".
  2. ^ American Art News, Obituary CLARA POTTER TAYLOR, November 26, 1921 p. 6