Bessie Ellen Davidson was born on 22 May 1879 in North Adelaide, South Australia, to a family of Scottish and English origin.

She was educated at the Advanced School for Girls (which had a strong drawing strand), and studied art with the painter Rose McPherson (better known as Margaret Preston).

She began exhibiting with the South Australian Society of Arts as early as 1901; in this period, her work clearly showed Preston's influence.

There she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, under René-Xavier Prinet, where she met and began a lifelong friendship with Philippe Besnard's future wife, Germaine Desgranges.

The postwar period between 1918 and 1920 saw Davidson producing quiet, intimate, loosely impressionistic paintings—mostly interiors, still lives, and portraits—in muted tones.

In 1931 she was appointed to the French Legion of Honor, in part for her cofounding of the Salon des Tuileries, the only Australian woman to receive that honour up to that time.

[4] She exhibited widely with such artists as Mary Cassatt, Tamara de Lempicka, Camille Claudel, and Suzanne Valadon.