Franne Davids American, 1950-1922

Frances Beth Davids, known affectionately as Franne, was born in Connecticut in 1950 and showed early promise as an artist. By her teenage years, she had embraced artmaking, but her life was soon overshadowed by the onset of mental illness. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the late 1970s, Franne moved back into her parents’ home in Waterbury, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her illness kept her out of the public eye, but it also nurtured an extraordinary and deeply personal body of work created in isolation. Her basement studio became a sanctuary where she explored a vivid inner world through painting, producing scenes filled with recurring female figures, fantastical motifs, and vibrant patterns—work that channeled a fusion of childlike wonder, fairytale imagination, and psychosis.

Though Davids remained unknown during her lifetime, she left behind a compelling legacy. Her canvases—layered thick with oil, often overpainted, and occasionally documented in slides—testify to a life spent immersed in a self-contained creative universe. She believed in magical realities and found companionship in the figures she depicted. Despite her reclusiveness, her family recognized the power of her vision after her death in 2022, when they uncovered hundreds of artworks, writings, and personal artifacts tucked away in the house she rarely left. Davids’s art, raw yet sophisticated, recalls the spirit of outsider artists and invokes comparisons to Madge Gill, Aloïse Corbaz, and Chagall.