Walter Deverell

Walter Howell Deverell (1827 – 2 February 1854 1854) was a United States-born British artist, closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Biography

Deverell was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, into an English family who moved back to Britain when Walter was only two years old. He studied art at the Royal Academy Schools, where he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He and Rossetti shared a studio in 1851 at 17 Red Lion Square. It consisted of three rooms on the first floor, and the studio room, looking north, had its window extended up to the ceiling to admit more light.[1] The Pre-Raphaelites had been founded in 1848, and under Rossetti's influence Deverell's work began to show the influence of the movement, while still retaining features more characteristic of earlier genre painters like Charles Robert Leslie.

It was Deverell who "discovered" Elizabeth Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelites' most important early model. However, despite his attraction to her, she later married Rossetti. Henry Treffry Dunn was recommended for the position of Rossetti's assistant by Deverell.[2] After the resignation of James Collinson from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti proposed that Deverell should replace him, but no decision was ever made.

Deverell completed very few important works, exhibiting only four paintings at the Royal Academy before his early death from Bright's disease at the age of twenty-seven. He lived in Kew, now part of London, where one of his paintings, A Pet, was done in his house.[3]

Walter Deverell died on 2 February 1854 from Bright’s Disease, in the company of John Everett Millais.[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Mackail, J.W. (1901). The Life of William Morris, Volume 1 (2nd ed.). London: Longmans, Green, and Co. p. 112.
  2. ^ "Your Paintings". Art UK. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
  3. ^ "A Pet, Walter Howell Deverell". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  4. ^ Moyle, Franny (2009). Desperate romantics: the private lives of the Pre-Raphaelites (1. publ. in paperback ed.). London: Murray. ISBN 978-1-84854-050-7.

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