Sculptor, chiefly of portrait busts, born on 3 June 1813 in Bloomsbury, London. His father was Dr David Daniel Davis (1777–1841), of Llandyfaelog, Carmarthenshire, one of the physicians who in 1819 attended the Duchess of Kent when she gave birth to Princess Victoria. (Some years later, in 1843, Davis exhibited a marble bust of the Duchess at the Royal Academy which, although not apparently commissioned by the royal family, is now in the Royal Collection.) Davis was trained in the workshop of Edward Hodges Baily on whose recommendation he entered the Royal Academy (RA) Schools in 1833, showing in the annual RA exhibitions for the first time in the following year; he was a regular contributor to the exhibitions until the year before his death, showing 115 works in all, the majority busts, with some statues and a few ideal subjects. In 1842 the Art Union commended his bust of the newly elected Associate RA, the painter (Sir) Francis Grant: ‘The free and flowing manner of the hair of this head is beyond all praise … in the whole there is as much of poetical sentiment as may be risked in portraiture.’ Two years later, however, two of the same journal’s writers came to differing conclusions about his model for The Power of the Law, a female figure with a chain, intended for the roof of the new Assize Courts at Cambridge. While the writer covering the RA exhibition in June considered its ‘severe and elevated style … consonant with the subject’, his counterpart covering the Westminster Hall Exhibition in August condemned it as ‘extremely heavy in character and coarse in execution … nothing beyond a sketch’. The Literary Gazette personalised its attack, lamenting, ‘Would that this gentleman had the power of doing something better’. (Following the demolition of the Courts in 1853, the statue, along with three others, was erected in the grounds of Bassingbourn Village College.) But despite these critical setbacks, Davis’s practice as a maker of busts – to judge by the number he was exhibiting in these years at the RA – was flourishing. His income from portraiture, plus the inheritance he presumably came into on the death of his father in 1841, meant that he could afford to have his Venus and Cupid group, exhibited in plaster at the RA in 1849, replicated in marble purely to make a splash at the 1851 Great Exhibition. As the Illustrated London News remarked, this ‘very graceful’ group was ‘the only work executed in marble, by a British artist, in this country, expressly, and without commission, for this Exhibition’. The group seems to have found a buyer, and at some point entered the collection of the Salford Art Gallery, but sadly its current whereabouts are unknown. Also in the Exhibition was Davis’s statue of the 5th Duke of Rutland, recently arrived from Paris after its casting in bronze by Simonet et fils, and due to be erected at Leicester the following spring. Designed for an eleven-foot-high pedestal (although now on one of just over 6 feet) it was displayed in the Crystal Palace on a three-foot-high block. The reviews were excoriating. The Manchester Times condemned it as clumsy and the Eclectic Review, inept. Following the statue’s unveiling in Leicester, however, the Leicester Journal pronounced the likeness ‘absolutely electrifying’, declaring, ‘Those who saw the Statue in the Exhibition … on a pedestal a yard high, can form no idea of what it is, – they must see it now … on its fitting pedestal … it is a noble Statue!’ While Davis had been preparing for the Great Exhibition, another of his public statues, to Major-General Sir William Nott, was erected without ceremony in Carmarthen. His third public statue, to Josiah Wedgwood, was lent by its subscribers to the 1862 International Exhibition at South Kensington, the Illustrated London News publishing an engraving of it and commending it as ’an excellent statue … a thoroughly sound and manly work of art’. The statue was unveiled in Stoke-upon-Trent early in the following year, on 24 February 1863. As evidence that Davis’s busts continued to be admired by the art establishment, two of them were commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1870s, the first of Daniel Maclise in 1871 and the second of John Constable in 1874. Davis died on 14 August 1878, the Art Journal’s obituary listing his major works and closing with a reprint of its review of his Cupid and Psyche (untraced) from the 1875 RA exhibition, ‘Mr. Davis, in his “Cupid and Psyche” – one of the most ambitious groups in the exhibition – has managed, without having recourse to the equivocal abandon of the French school, to endow his figures with beauty and grace, and to give tender and pure expression to the sentiment of love.’
Source from Ancestry website: England and Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers … Rg4 … London … Dr Wiliams’ Library Registry, Birth Certificates.
Bibliography: Art Journal: (i) 1 December 1862, p. 230, (ii) November 1878, p. 212 (obituary); Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of all Nations, 1851, p. 151 (engr. of Venus and Cupid); Art Union: (i) June 1842, p. 128. (ii) June 1844, p. 170, (iii) August 1844, p. 217; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 69–70; T. Cavanagh (with an introduction by A. Yarrington), Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. xii, xiv, xv, 86, 115, 120, 141–45, 179, 180; J. Darke, The Monument Guide to England and Wales, London, 1991, pp. 112, 128–29, 168–69, 176–77; The Eclectic Review, June 1851, p. 749; A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, 1905–06 (8 vols), Vol II (Carroll–Dyer), 1905, pp. 259–61; Illustrated London News: (i) 3 May 1851, p. 365, (ii) 28 June 1862, pp. 666, 668; Leicester Journal, 30 April 1852, p. 3; Literary Gazette, 27 July 1844 (no. 1436), p. 483; Manchester Times (supp.), 7 June 1851, p. 2; Mapping Sculpture; J. Marsden, European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King, London, 2025, vol. 2, pp. 730–31, no. 453; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. xviii–xix, xx, 150–51; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 343–46.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2026