The Frog in the box
with a nubile nude lady
When we moved house several years ago, I was determined not to pack my attic with vaguely labeled, spider-nursing, fire fodder. Several such cardboard boxes had made their way to me, passed from my parents’ attic and my grandparents’ attics, multiplying as they mysteriously do. Those days of dusty clearing out were rewarded when one box yielded a stack of random, unframed works of art on paper.
Clues in the contents — penciled notes in my paternal great-grandmother’s hand, labels from old art galleries in Boston, MA, marks possibly from travels abroad — suggested the box almost certainly came from Borderland, my grandmother’s childhood home. Grand B. (my great grandmother) lived there until she died in 1969. Some of the house contents came to my grandparents’ home in Nashville when the property was sold.
This etching in particular is a mystery. Its time aligns with the years Grand B. was teaching herself to make engravings, but this picture does not look like something my New England great grandparents would have collected.
Idealized female nudes rendered with the sinuous, elegant lines of Art Nouveau art and design proliferated in the early decades of the 20th century. New mass market periodicals like The Century (1881), The Ladies World (1886), Collier’s (1888) Life, (1897), Saturday Evening Post (1897), Vogue (1909), and Vanity Fair (1913) frequently featured them in cover art and illustrations. Like many 19th century American painters got their start in newspaper illustration, many classically trained artists in New York leaned into these commercial illustration opportunities to support or supplement their other art work.
Warren Burnham Davis (1865–1928) was one of them. A native New Yorker, he studied at the Arts Student League and provided editorial art, commercial illustration, and fine art to many periodicals, notably several covers for Vanity Fair. Davis also did oil paintings and limited edition etchings — virtually all dreamy, nubile young women like these — that were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Salmagundi Club and sold by art galleries in New York and Europe. It was fashionable, elegant, and mildly titillating fare enjoyed especially by well-to-do gentlemen.
Our etching is signed both in the plate — WARRENDAVIS in slant-left capitals (these would have been inscribed backwards by the artist) — and in pencil beneath the plate’s imprint, directly under her foot — Warren Davis imp. (a commonly used abbreviation for the Latin “impressit,” indicating that the artist printed it himself).
The title, The Frog, appears at the far left, written in pencil directly under the frog himself. He’s the most delightful part of the picture, to my eye.
What is this frog about? Other than a similar etching of a female nude and a squirrel — and so titled — Davis doesn’t appear to have included whimsical little creatures in his many other pictures of nude women, much less one worthy of the entire title.
The quality of the etching is excellent, the grace and economy of its lines truly impressive. It’s pretty, if rather vacuous; a quintessential example of its type. I had it framed, hung it in the powder bathroom, and always smile when the frog catches my eye.
Maybe Grand B. was equally enchanted by the frog, or she admired Davis’ technique and sought to emulate his elegant, sensuous lines, like when she made engravings of orchids:
Or perhaps one of my great uncles, both frequently in New York, bought this etching for his private enjoyment and left it at home for his mother to find — and pack away.
Looking online, I did find a few other prints of The Frog labeled in pencil as one of an edition of 150, but these didn’t have Warren’s signature in the plate. Our etching lacks any print number designation, but is that a white smudge where it should be, indicating erasure? Why do that? I gave up trying to untangle what this could mean, if anything, because it has no bearing on my enjoyment.
Finally, notice the arc indicating how the paper has faded. Did it lie on a table at Borderland, its left third covered by something round (a tray, a palette, a table lamp?) while the rest of the picture lay exposed to the bleaching sunlight? The possibilities are limitless, waiting only for our imagination and play — a noble purpose if ever there was one.
For a nice overview of how prints are made:
