Painted in 1919, Street in Gloucester is an important early work by Stuart Davis, created at a moment when the artist was consolidating his artistic identity in the years following his participation in the 1913 Armory Show. During the late 1910s, Davis spent time in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a seaside town that had long attracted American modernists seeking a balance between direct observation and formal experimentation. This painting reflects Davis’s engagement with the everyday urban environment, a subject that would remain central to his work throughout his career.



In Street in Gloucester, Davis depicts a compressed view of buildings, storefronts, and street activity, rendered with simplified forms and a strong emphasis on structure. While the scene remains legible and rooted in observation, the composition already shows Davis’s interest in flattening space and organizing the picture surface through bold contours and rhythmic intervals. The brushwork is confident yet restrained, and the color palette—though more subdued than in his later works— reveals his growing sensitivity to tonal relationships and compositional balance.



As an early example of Davis’s work, this painting demonstrates his transition away from academic realism toward a distinctly modern visual language. Influenced by Post-Impressionism and early European modernism, Davis began to treat the city not merely as a subject to be described, but as a framework for exploring pictorial order. The architectural elements in Street Scene, Gloucester function almost as blocks of color and shape, anticipating the dynamic abstractions and vibrant urban imagery that would define his mature style in the 1920s and beyond.



Street in Gloucester thus stands as a formative work, capturing Davis at the threshold of his artistic evolution—still grounded in observation, yet already moving decisively toward the bold, modern vision that would make him one of the leading figures of American modernism.