Randall Davey was a New Jersey-born painter trained directly by Robert Henri who moved to Santa Fe in 1920 and spent the next four decades working from the converted Army sawmill that is now the Randall Davey Audubon Center, a Henri-school portrait, equine, and landscape painter who built his life deliberately outside the larger American art markets.
Randall Davey (May 24, 1887 – November 8, 1964) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in East Orange, New Jersey. At his father's insistence he enrolled at Cornell University in 1905 to study architecture but received an "honorable dismissal" in 1908 without completing his degree, moving to New York to take up fine art instead. From 1909 he studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, the painter at the centre of the Ashcan School, and travelled with Henri through Holland and Spain in 1910. He showed in the 1913 Armory Show alongside his close associates George Bellows and John Sloan.
A 1919 motor trip from New York to Santa Fe with his first wife, the sculptor Florence Nicks Sittenham, and John and Dolly Sloan, was the decisive event of his life. Within a year he had purchased 135 acres on Upper Canyon Road for $3,000 and begun converting an 1847 Army-built sawmill into his home and studio. He lived and painted there for the next forty-four years, working across portraiture, equestrian subjects, landscape, and still life in oil, encaustic, pastel, watercolor, and a range of drawing media. He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, and the University of New Mexico (1945–1956). His heirs gifted the Santa Fe property to the National Audubon Society in 1983; the home and studio are preserved as the Randall Davey Audubon Center and Sanctuary.