James Augustine Joyce (1882-1941) is best known for his novels Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Davidson first met Joyce in 1919 and had long wanted to sculpt him, for he found the author "frail, detached and the essence of sensitivity." Davidson aptly captured the intellectual aspect of Joyce, and when the bust was exhibited in 1933 a critic wrote that it "bespeaks the restraint of the ascetic mingled with perplexity common to the brow of the philosopher." Although Davidson had difficulty rendering Joyce’s eyeglasses, he successfully indicated them with delicately incised lines and ridges. Joyce often shaved off his goatee, so Davidson made two versions of his head, one with and one without it.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has a terra-cotta example of the head.
