In her list of her husband’s paintings included in Royal Cortissoz’s book Arthur B. Davies (1931), Dr. Virginia M. Davies assigned this painting to 1908. However, this list is not always accurate. Davies rarely dated his paintings himself and did not develop in a linear manner, so the dates of many of his works have never been clearly determined. Pastoral Dells and Peaks relates to Davies’s experience of the American West. In 1905 he traveled to Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and California and made several oil sketches of the dramatic, high-peaked mountains. After this trip West he abandoned the more domestic, arcadian landscapes of his earlier pastorals in favor of looming, powerful mountain ranges. It was Davies’s memory of the Sierras and the soaring evergreens that inspired the background composition of Pastoral Dells and Peaks, although the artist simplified the setting, reducing its specificity. Davies was acquainted with ancient art and mythology and had visited southern Italy and Greece in 1897, 1910, and 1911. He often depicted his figures as classically robed shepherds and herders. While this scene probably was not intended to illustrate a specific story, it recalls the myth of Io, a beautiful maiden who was turned into a heifer for being loved by Jupiter. Davies follows the tradition of Greek vase painting by presenting the female figures in a paler color than the male figures. In 1908 the artist began to arrange his figures in dancers’ poses in long, friezelike processions along a shallow foreground in what he referred to as "continuous compositions." Pastoral Dells and Peaks does not have as many figures, nor is it as stringently composed along a processional line as Davies’s more mature paintings from about 1913. Consequently, it may be an early example of Davies’s continuous composition, perhaps inspired by one of his trips to Greece. So Pastoral Dells and Peaks may date as early as 1908 but probably not later than 1911.

The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception. A modern age marked by technological wonders had begun, and the United States was to be its focal point. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most brilliant thinkers, explained that, unlike Europe, “the New World expanded the human imagination.” Young American students still traveled to Europe, especially Paris, for their initiation to art, but the progressive new ideas of cubism, futurism, and surrealism that they imbibed only found their true home in the United States.
As demonstrated by the first generation of modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, American artists rarely abandoned referential ties to the physical world completely. The simplification of form, multiple perspectives, and ideas about the fourth dimension that radical proponents of cubism espoused would find their most compelling American expressions in the fishermen of Marsden Hartley, and the animal bones and skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. To these artists, abstraction meant the synthesis of personal experience.
The introduction of psychological ideas, first in the form of Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and later in the writings and art of the surrealists, found an enthusiastic audience in America. Such new concepts not only expanded ideas about the human mind but also encouraged the liberation of social conduct, in particular, sexual mores. Women increasingly became involved in creative aspects of the new modern age. In 1934 the Los Angeles artists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued the only surrealist manifesto to appear in the United States, thereby demonstrating that in a relatively short time California had seriously challenged New York as the leader of the brave new world.

• About the Era.
• Arthur B. Davies: a Chronological Retrospective. New York: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., 1975.
• Dream Vision: the Work of Arthur B. Davies. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1981.
• Kaplan, Julius.  Symbolism, Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century: an exhibition at the Art Gallery, California State College, San Bernardino, April 27-June 10, 1980.  San Bernardino, Calif.: California State College, 1980.
• Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.