Walter Deverell
Walter Howell Deverell was a United States-born British artist, closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His highly promising career was ended by his death at the age of twenty-six.
Biography
Deverell was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, into an English family who moved back to Britain when Walter was two years old. His father became Secretary of the Government School of Design, which later became the Royal College of Art, and was then at Somerset House on the Strand. The family lived at the premises until 1852.In 1843 Deverell began to work in the office of a solicitor in Westminster, but he wanted to be an artist and in 1844 entered Sass's Drawing Academy, in Bloomsbury Street. There he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a year younger, who moved to the Royal Academy Schools the same year, with Deverell following in 1846. There he met William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. These four began in 1848 "a short-lived revival of the Cyclographic Society, a group of students and amateurs who circulated drawings among themselves, inviting criticism from fellow members". He was not one of the seven, including the other three, who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood later that year.
In 1851, he and Rossetti shared a studio 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. 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. After the resignation of James Collinson from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti proposed that Deverell should replace him, but no decision was ever made.
Walter Deverell died on 2 February 1854 at the age of twenty-six from Bright's disease, in the company of John Everett Millais.
Works
Deverell completed very few important works, exhibiting only four paintings at the Royal Academy before his early death. He lived in Kew, now part of London, where one of his paintings, A Pet, was done in his house. None were very large, with the largest only just over a metre wide, and three featured scenes from Shakespeare, a very common source of subjects at the time. Two others are rather tightly composed portraits of women with pet birds.His largest painting, and by general agreement his most important, was Twelfth Night, or Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV which fetched £600,650 in an auction at Christie's in 2003. It "was clearly intended to be a major statement and a bid for recognition" by the 21-year old artist. The models for the three main figures are Deverell himself as Orsino, Elizabeth Siddal as Viola, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Feste. After Deverell's death it was looked after by Richard Burchett for a decade or so, before being turned over to Rossetti. The painting is now in a private collection. The reviews were mixed when it was shown at the National Institution of Fine Arts in 1850, and Deverell was unable to sell it during his lifetime; after his death it was owned by William Bell Scott and others. There is an ink and pencil study in Tate Britain.