February 12, 1850 - February 5, 1934,Davis, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was educated at Harvard. He returned to teach there in 1877 after a period as a meteorologist in Argentina and as an assistant with the North Pacific Survey. He became professor of physical geography in 1890 and of geology in 1898. Davis is acknowledged as the founder of geomorphology, the study of landforms. In his The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania (1889) he first introduced what later became known as the Davisian systems of landscape analysis. His aim was to provide an explanatory description of how landforms change in an ideal situation and his most important contribution to this was his introduction of the cycle of erosion into geographical thought. He proposed a complete cycle of youth, maturity, and old age to describe the evolution of a landscape. In youth rivers occupy steep V-shaped valleys while in old age the valleys are broad. The end product would be a flat featureless plain he called a epeneplaine. This was an ideal cycle but in practice the cycle would invariably be interrupted by Earth movements. It was, nevertheless, strongly attacked by German geographers who objected to it on the grounds that it neglected such vital factors as weathering and climate in transforming the landscape. They also believed him to be undermining their argument that landforms could only be discovered by local fieldwork and the production of regional monographs. Davis also produced an influential work,  Related Paintings of William Morris Davis :. | Petrus | Tiburon Housetops | Landscape with the Rest on the Flight | The virgin and child appearing to shepherds | The Execution of Lady Jane Grey |
Related Artists:
Clara Southern
Australian artist, 1860-1940 Australian painter. One of the first generation of progressive, professionally educated Australian women artists, she began her training as a pupil of Mme Mouchette, painter, schoolmistress and founder of the Alliance Fran?aise in Melbourne; and later took lessons from Walter Withers. As a student at the National Gallery of Victoria (1883-7) she was nicknamed 'Panther' for her lithe beauty. From mid-1888 she shared a teaching studio with Jane Sutherland in the new purpose-built Grosvenor Chambers, where Tom Roberts was a neighbour. She had 'caught the "Impressionist" fever', reported Table Talk (2 Aug 1889), and showed 'a great variety of charming little sketches, which however are not intended for exhibition'. She showed with the Victorian Artists' Society (1889-1917): mainly subjects around Kyneton and Melbourne's outer suburbs, painted in the fresh, quasi-Impressionist style characteristic of the Heidelberg school.
Theodor Kittelsen
1857-1914,was a Norwegian artist born in the coastal town of Kragero in Norway. He is famous for his nature paintings on the one hand, and on the other hand for his illustrations of fairytales and legends, especially of trolls. For a time, Kittelsen studied painting and watchmaking. When his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he attended classes at the School of Art in Christiania (the present Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he was able to continue his study in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draughtsman for German papers and magazines. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. Kittelsen started to write texts to his drawings here. In 1881, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian fairy-tales by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjornsen. His style could be classified between (Neo-)Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but does not receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is hardly registered in registers of painters. Black metal bands such as Burzum have used nearly all of his pictures as album art, notably illustrations taken from Kittelsen book Svartedauen (The Black Death).
Gerhard Wilhelm von Reutern
painted Abraham sacrificing Isaac in 1849