Don Davey

Don Davey was an American commercial illustrator whose drawings of New Orleans became some of the most widely owned pictures of the city ever made. He trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, worked for illustration studios there and in San Francisco, drew for national magazines and advertising agencies, and won gold and silver medals for his advertising art in New Orleans in the 1960s. From the middle of that decade he turned his pen and wash to the French Quarter and the plantation houses of the River Road, and issued them as inexpensive colour prints, portfolios and notepaper that were sold in department stores, gift shops and galleries for the next twenty years. Our print, a wrought iron gate opening into a Quarter courtyard, carries his copyright line in the plate: ©1968 Don Davey, New Orleans, La.

Chicago and the Studio Trade

Davey's training was the practical one that produced most of America's mid-century illustrators. Dealer and publisher biographies agree that his career began at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, the school on Michigan Avenue that turned out generations of commercial artists for the city's advertising studios. He went to work in that world. In August 1954 the San Francisco Chronicle's advertising column recorded that Don Davey, illustrator, formerly with the Whitaker-Guernsey Studios and the Dick Lewis Studios of Chicago, had joined the San Francisco agency Wyatt, Wallace, Marks and Welsh.

The same biographies say his illustrations appeared in McCall's, the Saturday Evening Post and Fortune, that he taught at an art academy in San Francisco, and that he helped organise a society of illustrators there and later served as its president. An invitation from the United States Air Force took him to the Far East, and a painting from that tour entered the Air Force's documentary art program. We have not yet confirmed those points in a primary source, and we present them as the published account.

Medals in New Orleans

By the middle of the 1960s Davey was working in New Orleans. In April 1965 the Times-Picayune printed the awards of the Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans, whose annual exhibition of the best advertising art from Louisiana and Mississippi was presented by James B. Byrnes, director of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art. Davey's name appears three times. As illustrator for the Walker Saussy agency, working with the art director Frank Sciortino, he took the gold medal for full colour magazine advertising and two silver medals for trade advertising, all for the same client: Avondale Shipyards, the great shipbuilder on the Mississippi above the city. A man who could make a hull or a crane read clearly and handsomely on a magazine page was exactly the draughtsman the Quarter needed.

The Quarter in Four Prints

He found the subject that would make his name in the old city itself. On Sunday 15 December 1968, the year of our print, the D. H. Holmes department store on Canal Street ran a Christmas advertisement in the Times-Picayune headed Colorful French Quarter Prints by Don Davey. It offered a portfolio of four prints, each ten by thirteen inches, for four dollars: Pirates Alley, Chartres Street, Brulatour Courtyard and the Wishing Gates. Single prints came matted to thirteen by sixteen inches for two dollars each. A second portfolio gave the plantation houses Rosedown, Belle Helene, Elmwood and Oak Alley, and boxed notepaper with his Quarter and plantation scenes sold for a dollar and a half. The illustrations in the advertisement include an arched carriageway with a hanging lantern and open iron gates, the same composition as ours.

That is the world our print came from: a modest, well made souvenir of the Quarter, sold matted at a department store counter and framed by its owner, which is why so many survive in old gilt frames like this one.

A Million Pictures

Davey kept drawing the city for decades. A Bourbon Street print is recorded with a 1984 date and distribution by Cunningham Enterprise; a French Quarter nights drawing is dated 1987; a pencil drawing of the modern steamboat Natchez, the sternwheeler long captained by Doc Hawley, is preserved by the Online Steamboat Museum. His later publisher, Colony Publishing of San Francisco, claimed that more than a million lithographs of his work had been bought by collectors, in a landmark series that ran from Chicago's Old Town to the Monterey Peninsula, San Francisco, Louisiana's plantation homes, New Orleans and Hawaii.

Why Davey Matters

Davey belongs to a tradition New Orleans has always loved: the artist who draws the Quarter not as a tourist poster but as a set of real places, gates and passages and balconies with their rust and their patched stucco left in. His trained illustrator's line and his muted colour, faded blush, oxidised iron and soft teal, gave thousands of households a picture of the city as it actually looked. Few of those households knew who he was. The newspapers let us put his name back on the gate.