ANTHONY DEVIS
1729, Preston, Lancashire - 1816, Albury, Surrey
The landscape-painter and drawing-master Anthony Devis came from a family that included several successful artists; his older half-brother Arthur (1712-87) achieved eminence as a painter of small portraits and informal ‘conversation pieces’. Arthur’s sons (Thomas Anthony, 1757-1810, and Arthur William, 1762-1822) also pursued artistic careers.
An entry in the Preston Guild Roll for 1742 shows that Anthony was already working as a painter in London by the age of thirteen, having evidently moved there with Arthur and his other elder half-brothers. He exhibited in London from 1761 onwards; these exhibits were usually entitled simply A Landscape (e.g. RA 1781, no. 148) but he is known to have had commissions from a succession of patrons with estates in Wales and in many parts of England. By the end of the 1750s he had begun producing Lake District views, including the large oil painting now in Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, View of Derwentwater and Skiddaw from Lord’s Island. Nothing is known of his visits to the Lake District save that he produced a number of drawings in a very lively and distinctive style. Apart from the examples owned by the Wordsworth Trust, the known Cumbrian subjects among his drawings (listed in Pavière, 1950, pp. 80-98) include Borrowdale and the Bowder Stone, Bowness, Furness Fell, Langdale, the Langdale Pikes (with Blea Tarn) and Rydal Head (with Loughrigg and Elterwater). Besides such topographical drawings (often annotated with names) he also produced a number of imaginary idealised landscapes in the style of the Old Masters which fall into the category of ‘capricci’.
In London Devis lived in Bloomsbury from 1762 onwards, at first in Gloucester Street and later in Lamb’s Conduit Street, but in 1780 he bought Albury House near Guildford in Surrey, to which he later retired. Uncertainty long surrounded his date of death, but it is clearly inscribed on his tombstone in the churchyard at Albury: 26 April 1816.
LITERATURE
ODNB entry for Arthur Devis by Ellen D. Oench; Sydney H. Pavière, The Devis Family of Painters, Leigh on Sea, 1950.
19.2.2015
Powell, Cecilia
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