(b Dublin, 1812; d London, April 22, 1873). Irish painter. He was trained in Dublin and exhibited portraits at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1833 to 1835. He was in Sheffield in 1837 and by 1846 was in Liverpool, probably drawn there by the flourishing Liverpool Academy. He exhibited at the Academy from 1842 to 1844, became a Member in 1853 and Professor of drawing from 1856 to 1859. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy in London (1851–72) and at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition (1871–3). He turned from figure and still-life subjects of game to landscape painting c. 1853, probably persuaded by his chief patron, John Miller, and influenced by the Liverpool landscape painter Robert Tonge (1823–56) and later by the Pre-Raphaelites. During the late 1850s Davis was a member of the Hogarth Club in London. Dante Gabriel Rossetti admired Davis’s first landscape exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855 (untraced) and alerted Ruskin, who judged it merely as ‘good Pre-Raphaelite work’, and found Davis’s subjects, which were never obvious views, without interest. The paintings were usually small and recorded the north-west of England, and occasionally Ireland, (e.g. Liverpool, Walker A.G.) either in wide-sweeping depth or by close-up confrontation of duck-pond, windmill or cornfield, and effective use was made of a high horizon. Davis’s fluid technique tightened under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites (sometimes becoming over-spotty), and his colour brightened....