Charles H Davis (American, France 1856 - 1933) Tonalist landscape at sunset. Housed in a carved gilt carved signed R.C. Vose frame. Signed lower left. Oil/Canvas. Sight Size: 19.5 x 26.5 in. Charles Davis became one of the more recognized of the Tonalist and Impressionist painters in America. He was also the leading member of the colony of artists who gathered at Mystic, Connecticut. His early landscapes that gave him the reputation for Tonalism and that resulted from his visit to Barbizon, France, depicted every hour from dawn to sunset with a subtlety of form and color. However, in the mid 1890s, his style changed dramatically to Impressionism. He enrolled at the Academie Julian with Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger but lived for ten years near Barbizon where he was much influenced by that style of landscape painting. He married a French woman, Angele Legarde, and also exhibited at the Paris Salon. sent works home and had one-man exhibitions regularly at Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston. In 1891, he returned to the United States and settled in Mystic, Connecticut where the local area provided him with many rural subjects for his painting, which emphasized the quiet aspects of nature. He started the Mystic Art Colony in 1892, and shortly after that, critics began to notice a change in his style that was becoming increasingly Impressionistic. Davis exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, the National Academy of Design in New York, the Armory Show of 1913, and the Pan-Pacific Exposition in 1915. He won a silver medal at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris.