Charles Harold Davis was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts in 1856. He began his career in a carriage factory but, after seeing an exhibition of French Barbizon School painting that featured the works of Jean Francois Millet, enrolled at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1877. In 1880, a local businessman gave Davis a thousand dollars to study in France, where he lived for the next decade. While in France, Davis studied at the Académie Julien with Jules Lefebvre and continued to be heavily influenced by the Barbizon style. He displayed regularly at both the Paris Salon and the Paris Exposition, and sent works back to the United States for frequent one-man shows at Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston.
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In 1891 Davis returned to the States with his French wife, Angele Legarde, and the two settled in Mystic, Connecticut. The rural Mystic area provided him with the subject matter for his landscapes, which quickly became Impressionist. In 1892, he founded the Mystic Art Colony and, by 1895, he was focused primarily on the theme of clouds, using a low horizon line to emphasize the forms and movement of the clouds and the open, brilliant blues of the sky. In April likely comes from this period, due not just to the subject matter but as well to the loose Impressionist brushwork and emphasis on the quality of light. While In April is certainly an Impressionist painting, the soft greens and grays and the subtle transition from light to shadow across the landscape hint at the Tonalist style of Davis’ early career and lend a sense of quiet and stillness to the painting.
Davis’ paintings won numerous prizes and medals during his career and he enjoyed both critical and commercial success in his lifetime. He was exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, and the National Academy, and his works were shown in major national and international exhibitions, including the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris, the Armory Show of 1913, and the Pan-Pacific Exposition in 1915. Davis died in Mystic at the age of 77.