Metro Roundup: Artist gives new life to Davenport’s mural

For more than 50 years, visitors to Davenport’s Pizza Palace in Mountain Brook Village have dined in the shadows of a mural covering one wall of the family restaurant’s game room.

But the years took their toll on the Italy-inspired scene, the colors fading and the wall damaged by posters and other things being put up.

But now, the mural has been restored to its original state, thanks to artist Sarah Soule Webb, who spent three days meticulously repairing the damage of time.

“My goal was to maintain the integrity and originality of it,” Webb says. “I didn’t want to reinvent it. I just wanted to restore it, which took some imagination – what did it look like 60 years ago?”

Amanda Thames, the granddaughter of Davenport’s original owners and now a co-owner of the restaurant with other family members, says the mural was originally painted in 1966, two years after the pizzeria opened. Rex and Ardyce Hollis were the owners of the restaurant, and they named it after baseball player Jim Davenport, a childhood friend of Rex’s.

“My great-uncle Ken, my grandmother’s brother, knows a lot of the history about it,” Thames says of the mural. “Originally, there were some baseball players painted on the wall, but a couple of years later, they thought about a mural with an Italian theme. A customer came in and said, ‘I can do that for you,’ and painted this mural. It hasn’t been touched since then.”

Thames thought her friend Webb would be perfect for the restoration project.

“I paint water, and I’ve painted murals,” says the artist, whose website is sswstudios.com. “I think that’s why she thought of me.”

The mural depicts a Venice-like setting, with water the focal point. Gondolas and gondoliers are in the water, and two women walk nearby.

“The warmer tones are what fade first in art, so all the people had just disappeared in the image, and the water was just all white,” Webb says. “The outlines were there, but the flesh tones were gone. I kept the outlines and just filled them in.”

Thames says Webb brought just the right touch to the project.

“She knew we didn’t want to totally redo it and make it more bright or colorful,” Thames says. “We wanted to bring it back to life, and it looks great.”

As she restored the mural, Webb looked for an artist’s signature, but there wasn’t one, so the original artist remains unknown.

“I put my signature in there, but I hid it,” she says. “It’s off in the distance under the bridge. I didn’t want it to be about me. I wanted this to honor the original artist.”

It also restores the game room – which also features vintage video games – to what many Davenport’s customers remember, Thames says.

“Because we’ve been around so long, so many people talk about having had events like a T-ball end-of-the-season party in that room with the same mural,” she says. “Anytime we have a big group or big party, it’s in that room.”

And now it’s back to its former glory.

“I was worried about even touching it, because I didn’t want it to be too bright and cartoonish,” Thames says. “I wanted to make it look old and authentic, and that’s what Sarah did. It looks just like it did before.”