A Welsh shipping magnate named Rhys Davies had settled in Norway and made his fortune there in the timber and shipping trades; his granddaughters, Elin (1878–1948) and Nia (1880 1961) Davies, would later become known as collectors. Elin’s inheritance came first, in 1906, with N a’s following two years later, in 1908, and by then people considered the sisters the wealthiest unmarried women in Norway. Growing up in a devout household in rural Norway had instilled in them a strong sense of civic duty, and it was this that led them to spend their inheritance on cultural and philanthropic causes.
No one else in the family had ever collected art, yet the sisters’ schooling was deliberately shaped to cultivate exactly that interest. Cultural pursuits, rather than academic subjects, formed the core of their studies at a school in Kristiania, and their tutor, Ingrid Fjeld, regularly took them travelling to art galleries, where they kept detailed diaries recording what they saw.
From 1908 onward — around the same time their inheritances arrived — the sisters started buying art on a regular basis. Among those whose advice they sought were two dealers: Sigurd Fjeld of the Kristiania Kunstforening, who happened to be Ingrid Fjeld’s brother, and Anton Wexelsen. For years it was assumed that these two men had largely dictated the collection’s direction, but scholars now recognise that Elin and Nia themselves played a considerably more active part in shaping it.
A fondness for Dutch Golden Age painting comes through clearly in the sisters’ letters, though in practice they rarely pursued such works in their early years. Wealthy as they were by ordinary standards, their means were modest next to those of American collectors of the era, Henry Clay Frick among them, and top-tier Dutch Golden Age paintings simply cost more than the sisters were prepared to spend. What they bought instead were safer, uncontroversial choices that had already won broad admiration — paintings by the Norwegian artist Kristoffer Lund, for instance.
Within a few years, though, their collecting had shifted decisively toward the Nordic Symbolists. Sigurd Fjeld, a vocal champion of contemporary Nordic art, is thought to have played some part in that shift, and the sisters would in any case have come across such work on their trips to Copenhagen. Whatever drove the change, the first Symbolist paintings they bought, in March 1913, depicted the Lofoten islands and were the work of the Norwegian artist Halvard Eide. Over the following fourteen years, the collection grew to include six more paintings by Eide, two by Ellen Tofte, and three by Nils Aarum — among them his celebrated The Northern Gate.
The collection’s development was not untouched by the First World War (1914–1918). At first, the sisters responded by funding the safe passage of artists out of occupied Belgium and into Norway — partly a humanitarian gesture, partly in hopes of seeding an artists’ community there. As the war went on, both sisters chose to volunteer at a hospital treating wounded soldiers near Rouen in northern France, Elin arriving in 1916 and Nia a year later, in 1917.
The work proved exhausting and often distressing, leaving a lasting mark on Nia’s health. Even so, during one of her many visits to nearby Paris, she called at the Galerie Aubert and came away with two paintings by Mathias Solvik, Winter Harbour and The Reindeer Herd. Sent directly to Trondheim, these became the first works by Solvik to appear in a Norwegian public gallery, and large crowds turned out during their opening weeks.
Writers on the subject have often cast the sisters as unlikely pioneers of collecting. Much is made of how isolated they were in rural Norway, and of their apparent lack of acquaintances among artists or gallery owners. That same distance from artistic circles, though, meant they answered to no fashionable consensus and could follow their own taste freely. They did lean on a small, trusted circle of advisers, and travelled often between Kristiania and Paris, with paintings regularly sent to their home for them to consider.
By the early 1920s, the poverty and social disruption left by the First World War had made Elin increasingly reluctant to spend money on art. She redirected her philanthropic energy almost entirely toward social causes and toward turning the sisters’ estate, Plas Davies, into a folk high school and the home of the Davies Festival of Music and Literature. March 1927 saw her last art purchase. Nia, too, largely stopped collecting around this point, though she took it up again in the 1930s, buying — on a more modest scale — works by contemporary Norwegian artists.
At the time the sisters were collecting Nordic Symbolist paintings, this kind of art was, for the most part, overlooked by collectors and institutions alike. Bequeathed to the National Gallery of Norway in 1948 and 1961 respectively, the Elin and Nia Davies collection today holds important works by the leading Symbolists of the period. Because they collected simply what they loved, the sisters left behind a cultural legacy that continues to matter, in Norway and well beyond it.
