Davey deliberately built his career on the edge of the American art establishment, choosing Santa Fe over New York, choosing teaching and a small farm over a more aggressive gallery practice, and choosing a particular Henri-derived realism over the dominant modernist tendencies of his contemporaries, and the body of work he left across half a century in the same Canyon Road studio is the result of those choices.
Davey came to art through his father's wishes for an architectural career and his own quiet refusal of them. The Cornell years gave him a structural foundation in design and drafting; the departure without a degree gave him the freedom to pursue painting in New York. The Henri studio at the New York School of Art was at that point the most influential American teaching environment for the loose group of painters associated with the Ashcan School, and Davey's European travels with Henri, through Holland to study Hals and Rembrandt and Spain to study Velázquez, gave him the close exposure to the Old Masters that Henri considered essential.
The Armory Show, in which Davey was included, brought his work to a wider American audience at the moment European modernism was being introduced to the United States, and his close working friendships with Bellows and Sloan placed him within the centre of New York's progressive painting circle. He continued to work in New York and East Hampton through the 1910s, building a portrait and figure practice in the Henri tradition.
The Santa Fe trip with the Sloans was made on a whim, a long automobile drive across the country at a time when such trips were still uncommon, but it produced an immediate and lasting attachment to northern New Mexico. The Upper Canyon Road property, with the disused sawmill at its centre, gave Davey both a working space and a private landscape, and the conversion of the sawmill into a home and studio (a project that occupied him for years and that he extended over decades) made the property one of the more distinctive artist's houses in the American Southwest.
His mature painting drew on the Henri-school commitment to direct observation and unfussy painterly handling. Portrait commissions formed one part of his practice; the equine paintings, racehorses, polo ponies, the working horses of his New Mexican neighbours, formed another; and the landscapes and still lifes filled out a body of work that was deliberately resistant to the modernist tendencies dominating his contemporaries. He was capable of a more advanced idiom, his early work shows real engagement with the European tendencies of his Armory Show period, but he chose to settle into a more traditional handling for most of his career.
The teaching career across Chicago, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, and Albuquerque gave him a steady income and a Western institutional presence. His final decade was spent largely at the Santa Fe property, painting and managing the small farm he had built there. The Audubon Society gift has preserved both the natural sanctuary and the artistic environment in which he worked for nearly half his life.