Born in 1712 he was an English portrait painter and is known for a type of portrait called a conversation piece. In 1735 his first commission was Hoghton Towers from Duxon Hill, Lancashire. This showed his interest in landscape but two years later he became established as a portrait painter having a studio in Great Queens Street London.
He was born in Lancashire in the town of Preston. He was born in 1712 and lived to be 75.
He was well known for: Painting
Arthur Devis was born in Preston, Lancashire, the eldest son of Anthony Devis. It may have been the latter, a member of the town council as well as a carpenter and a bookseller, that was responsible for introducing Devis to the Flemish painter Peter Tillemans, who became his teacher. During the early 1730s, Devis is known to have been an assistant in Tillemanss studio, apparently copying views of Italy by artists such as Pannini and Marco Ricci. Not surprisingly, the first work Devis painted on commission, a depiction of a house within its park, also shows his interest in landscape (Hoghton Towers from Duxon Hill, Lancashire, 1735 Private collection). By 1737, however, he had become a portrait painter. In 1745, he established a studio in Great Queen Street, Lincolns Inn Fields in London, the location of an academy of painting opened in 1711. By this time he had acquired a considerable artistic reputation.
Devis received his greatest number of commissions for portraits between 1748 and 1758. Many of his works have landscape backgrounds, while his interiors, though convincing, are often pure imagination. The exception is the neo-Gothic library at Arbury Hall shown in Deviss portrait of Sir Roger Newdigate, who holds the plan for the room on his knee.
In 1768 he became president of the newly founded Free Society of Artists, where he also exhibited works between 1761 and 1775 and in 1780, but in fact his place in the portrait market was already slumping in the 1760s, and in the face of the output of such as Joshua Reynolds and Johann Zoffany, his work came to be considered outmoded.He was never admitted to membership of the Royal Academy. Art reviewers and observers like Horace Walpole were very critical of it. For income he was obliged to take up restoring pictures, though this could be remunerative. In particular for work d between 1777 and 1778, he was paid the handsome fee of one thousand pounds for restoring works by James Thornhill (1675-1734) in the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich.
In 1783 Devis sold all the paintings in his possession and in 1787 died in retirement in Brighton. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Paddington, London.