Italian Hill Town by Arthur Bowen Davies

This is 'Italian Hill Town,' painted in 1925 by the American artist Arthur B. Davies. It hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 774.

Look first at the citadel at the peak, anchoring the whole composition, and then let your eye fall down the cascade of white buildings. Davies painted this with a loose, visible brushwork that leaves individual strokes unblended, giving the hillside a textured, almost vibrating quality. The soft Mediterranean haze and the vivid green fields below frame a town that seems carved from the ochre rock itself.

Davies traveled frequently to Italy after 1923, seeking a better climate for his failing health. He died there in 1928. But decades earlier, he was a central, secretive figure in American art: a quiet organizer who co-founded the legendary 1913 Armory Show with Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, introducing Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp to a shocked American public.

That was not his only secret. Davies lived a double life, with two families, neither knowing of the other. And as a trusted advisor to collectors, he helped quietly assemble some of the most important private collections of the era. His life was as layered and hidden as one of his painted hillsides.