Thomas Nathaniel Davies

Who was Thomas Nathaniel Davies?

Thomas Nathaniel Davies was a Welsh artist and teacher, born in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. Shunning a promising early career with Cardiff City Football Club, he enrolled at Cardiff College of Art in 1939, where he was taught and befriended by the painter Ceri Richards.

His studies were interrupted by the Second World War and he was called up for service with the Royal Corps of Signals in North Africa. On his return he taught for a brief period at the Royal College of Art where the sculptor John Skeaping, a professor there, became a close friend. In 1945 he accepted a job at Newton Abbot Art School, before later becoming the Head of Art at South Devon College, Torquay.

During this post-War period he produced paintings that reflected both his childhood in the grey iron town of Dowlais and the green landscape of his new life in Devon. It also marked an intense time of portrait painting, with influences ranging from Post-Impressionism to Picasso. His self-portraits from this period also form a small but masterly body of his work, in which the artist is searching out his real identity as an individual and as a painter in the aftermath of the War.