Theodore Montgomery Davis
- Bobby Kelley
- Sep 5
- 3 min read
(May 7, 1838 - February 23, 1915)
Theodore Montgomery Davis was born in Springfield, Otsego County, New York, on May 7, 1838. He trained as a lawyer in Iowa City and later practiced in Washington and New York, where he prospered in both law and business.
With the wealth he acquired, Davis settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and commissioned one of the city’s notable Gilded Age estates. Known as The Reef, the shingle and stone villa was built in 1885 by the Boston firm Sturgis and Brigham. The grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who created an extensive coastal landscape at Brenton Point, maintained for many years under the care of head gardener Angus Macmillan. The house stood as a Newport landmark until its demolition in 1963, while its carriage house and stables, later called “The Bells,” remained a familiar sight for decades.
In 1860 Davis married Annie Buttles, a union that endured throughout his life. During the late 1880s his household also included Annie’s cousin, Emma Buttles Andrews, who became his close companion and hostess. Andrews moved into The Reef in 1887 and thereafter accompanied Davis on his long winter seasons in Egypt. Her detailed diaries of these journeys remain a vivid record of the social world of American travelers along the Nile.
Davis’s interest in Egypt grew after an 1890 voyage, when fellow Rhode Islander Charles Wilbour introduced him in Luxor to the dealer Muhammad Mohassib. Mohassib supplied many Western collectors, and Davis, like others, began to acquire antiquities. Before long, however, he turned his attention to sponsoring excavations. In 1902 he agreed to fund the Egyptian Antiquities Service in the Valley of the Kings. That first season brought notable results, including the clearing of KV45, the tomb of Userhet, and objects from above KV36, the tomb of Maiherpri. Encouraged by these discoveries, Davis renewed his sponsorship annually, with the work in his name directed first by Howard Carter and then by James E. Quibell, each serving as inspector general of antiquities for Upper Egypt.
In 1905 Davis secured a formal concession to excavate and began employing his own teams. Over the next decade his field directors included Edward R. Ayrton, E. Harold Jones, and Harry Burton, all of whom later held distinguished positions in Egyptology. The results of these campaigns were extraordinary. Between 1902 and 1913, excavations under his sponsorship uncovered or cleared about thirty tombs, among them KV46, the tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu, KV55, often called the Amarna cache, KV57, the tomb of Horemheb, and KV54, a cache associated with the embalming of Tutankhamun. Finds were presented primarily to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which established the Salle Theodore Davis in recognition of his contributions, while other objects entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other American institutions. Davis published seven volumes describing his discoveries, among them The Tomb of Thoutmosis IV, The Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou, and The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou, works that disseminated detailed records of his expeditions to scholars and the public alike.
Despite these achievements, Davis grew convinced by 1912 that the Valley of the Kings had yielded all it had to offer. In his final report he declared that the site was exhausted. After 1913 his concession passed to Lord Carnarvon, and in November 1922 Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, only a short distance from where Davis had ended his own excavations. Later accounts emphasized how close Davis’s last trenches had come to the sealed entrance, and his pessimistic conclusion became one of the most famous misjudgments in the history of archaeology. Yet his record remains remarkable, for his teams carried out some of the most productive campaigns ever conducted in the Valley, discoveries that continue to shape the study of ancient Egypt.
Davis was also an important art collector. At his death he bequeathed significant works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including paintings by Italian masters such as Gentile da Fabriano and Giovanni Bellini, together with a large group of antiquities now catalogued as the Theodore M. Davis Collection. These gifts reflected his wide-ranging cultural interests and secured his reputation in the art world as well as in Egyptology.
In his later years Davis wintered abroad or in warmer climates. In 1915 he rented Villa Serena in Miami, the home of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. He died there on February 23 of that year at the age of seventy-six. His body was cremated, and his ashes were returned to Rhode Island for burial in Section E, Lot 24, 25, Grave 1 of Island Cemetery in Newport.
