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FLOYD MACMILLAN DAVIS

1896 - 1966

BiographyFloyd Macmillan Davis (1896-1966) gave much of the credit for the sucess of his pictures to the critical judgement of his wife, painter Gladys Rockmore Davis. Floyd's point of view, however was uniquely his own. His visual world was peopled by a gallery of wonderful characters depicted with poetic realism and warm humor. The wealth of detail in his pictures would seem to have required much study from models or photos of them. In fact, Davis did not use any models at all but relied instead on his remarkably retentive memory and lievely imagination.
In his early years, he produced a great deal of advertising illustration notable for the ragile beauty and lofty hauteur of the society types he drew.
In the thirties, Davis began to illustrate stories of humbler subjects. His pictures of southern rural and hill people for such authors as William Faulkner, Sigman Byrd, Glenn Allan and MacKinlay Kantor became immensely popular. He loved those assignments and filled the pictures not only with a fascinating cast of individuals, but added the special Davis touchs, a cat crouched in the corner ready to leap out at a rival, a fly on an old man's head, a small lizard hiding behind a tree. None of these details intruded on the narrative itself; they were there for the perceptive viewer to discover. Readers responded enthusiastically: his pictures were admired as much as the stories themselves.
With the outbreak of World War II. Davis was selected as a correspondent-artist for the War Department and painted in various war theatres. Many of these distinguished paintings were reproduced by "Life" magazine as part of a pictoral record of the war, and were hung in the Pentagon builing in Washington D.C.
Over the years, Davis won several Art Directors Club medals and other awards, but more importantly, his work had the admiration of his whole profession. Floyd Davis was one of the great figures of American Illustration.

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