MR. W. H. DEVERELL.
An artist from whose independent thought and keen sense of beauty we had felt warranted in anticipating results of unusual excellence, Mr. Walter Howell Deverell, died on the 2d instant, after several months' severe illness, at the early age of scarcely twenty-five years.
Mr. Deverell was the son of the late Secretary to the School of Design, in which he himself held a mastership, and was a pupil of the Royal Academy. For the last five or six years he had been a pretty regular con- tributor to the annual exhibitions. In 1850 he sent to the National Insti- tution in Langbam Place a picture of considerable size from "Twelfth Night," containing a large number of figures, and displaying an extraor- dinary amount of character and invention, refined Shaksperean feeling, and high qualities of colour, in spite of some immaturity. This was fol- lowed in the succeeding year by the Banishment of Hamlet, exhibited in the same gallery ; a somewhat smaller work, which, for intellectual grasp and complete expression of the subject, left nothing undone. Last year a group of portraits, and a third Shaksperean treatment, Rosalind tutoring Orlando in the ceremony of marriage, were treated by the hanging com- mittee of the Academy with an invidious harshness, for which it was decreed that there should be no future opportunity of compensation. He has left unfinished a picture, begun only a few months before the end ; for whose subject, with a presentiment rather fatal than self-conscious, be had chosen a physician's final leavetaking of the family of a hopeless. patient.
A perfect simplicity and unconquerable buoyancy of heart united with the qualities which make social intercourse the most endearing to render Walter Howell Deverell one of those from whom it is hardest to part. A genius cut short, a life unaccomplished, here. "Vuolsi cool cola dove si puote
Cio the si vuole; e pia non dimandare."
Previous page
