Female Nude with Ram

Arthur B. Davies's "Female Nude with Ram" is a charcoal drawing heightened with white pastel on reddish brown laid paper. The reddish brown paper gives the drawing a warm, luminous foundation, against which the charcoal creates shadows and the white pastel picks out highlights. The subject—a female nude accompanied by a ram—suggests a mythological or allegorical theme. The ram may refer to classical myths: the Golden Fleece, the ram of Phrixus, or the god Pan in his animal aspect. Davies frequently used classical and mythological references, but in an allusive, dreamlike manner rather than as illustrations of specific stories. The nude figure is rendered in Davies's characteristic elongated, graceful style, the white pastel highlighting her form against the dark charcoal background. The ram, with its curved horns, provides a strong compositional counterpoint to the female figure. This work embodies Davies's symbolist sensibility: the real and the mythical, the human and the animal, coexisting in a timeless, dreamlike space.

Davies's mythological drawings create a personal mythology that blends classical references with his own dreamlike sensibility, offering a vision of a world where the human and the mythical coexist in harmony.

This enigmatic drawing of a woman and a ram exemplifies Davies's symbolist imagination, the warm paper and delicate handling creating a dreamlike encounter between the human and the mythological.