Arthur Devis moved to London in 1742 and had, with his wife Elizabeth Falkner (1723–1788), twenty-two children (six survived to adulthood), of which two became painters, Thomas Anthony Devis (1757–1810) and Arthur William Devis (1762–1822). Devis abandoned pure landscape painting by the 1740s to concentrate on small-scale singular or group portraits. His earliest dated work of this type is his 1741 Portrait of William Henry, 4th Marquis of Lothian, and he completed about 188 of them in the 1740s and 1750s.² By the 1760s, this mode of portraiture had gone out of favor, and Devis’s output lessened. He instead focused on the restoration of objects until his retirement in 1783, four years before his death.

This sheet is a preparatory drawing for the painting Portrait of a Lady in a Landscape from 1750 in the Rienzi Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (fig. 2.1). In the drawing, executed in black chalk with touches of red and white chalk on blue paper, the modest, slightly built woman is shown full-length, elegantly dressed, and with proper deportment. Devis masterfully defines the shape and volume of her form through the fine hatching and crosshatching, and the free manner of his chalk marks gives the figure a lifelike appearance. The lady appears in fashionable formal daywear: an open-fronted silk gown with loose lace-trimmed, elbow-length sleeves, called a sacque dress or robe à la française.³ It is pleated at the shoulders at the front and the back and has a funnel-shaped bust. Her tightly laced corset, a garment often made of linen and whalebone, is worn under the bodice to make her appear frontally flat. The ruffled, dome-shaped, and probably quilted skirt adds width and provides warmth—sensible attire for the English countryside. She dangles her bonnet from her bare left arm. The right arm is covered by a turned-up silk and lace glove, and she holds the other glove with her right hand. The open ends of the gloves indicate that they were meant for summertime wear, and they accent the beauty of the shape of the hands and arms while also covering her delicate white skin. 

The woman’s face is shaped, like many of Devis’s women, as a well-defined oval—a contemporary English preference remarked on by the French, who, preferring a more rounded face, described it as le visage de mouton (face of a sheep).⁴ As well-bred women of the day avoided direct sunlight, she is fittingly pale except for the artist’s jewel-like touches of rosy color upon her cheeks. Devis clearly drew upon books of deportment at the time, such as François Nivelon’s manual Rudiments of Genteel Behavior, published in London in 1737, or a section called “all manners of posture” in Thomas Page’s Art of Painting from 1720, in which he stated that “young women, in particular, should be given postures very graceful and airy, their Heads gently turned a little in a sort of reigning manner . . . the hands are of great consequence . . . in admiration, we hold the hands up, bent somewhat with all the fingers closed.”⁵

Devis’s usual artistic process often involved a preliminary study of the sitter’s head made directly in oil on canvas. He would then work up a sitter’s costume based on draping fabrics over a lay figure—a large, articulated, jointed or modular wooden doll, approximately thirty inches in height, dressed in costume. A sitter would then visit the artist’s studio for a single sitting for him to capture the person’s likeness, and sometimes the same costumes appeared on more than one of his patrons.⁶ Full-length drawings of his sitters appear to be extremely rare and are only known in three examples, including this one, that have survived. In each instance, he has focused not only on the visages but also on their poses and dress (fig. 2.2).⁷

The woman portrayed in Study for Lady in a Landscape is slightly larger in size than in the painting, yet the sitter’s identity remains a mystery.⁸ Devis’s customers tended to come from the wealthy landowning and professional classes more than from the nobility, though all of these groups often preferred the up-to-date, less strict, and more sociable way of being portrayed. There is an early inscription in the upper right of the drawing suggesting that the sitter is the “Countess of Castelmaine,” but this name has not been connected to a known person. Also, the date is indicated as “1739.” However, this date seems too early in Devis’s career, and Ellen D’Oench suggests that the painting Lady in a Landscape, to which this drawing relates, should be dated to the early 1760s based on stylistic grounds. A slightly earlier date of 1750 seems likely when considering the woman’s dress, which was then at its most fashionable.⁹  

Although the drawing focuses on the portrait of the lady, the small-scale painting in the Rienzi Collection places the lady in her surroundings: on a grassy lawn with a house in the distance. She appears to be not entirely assimilated into the surrounding picture, standing sharply delineated against the background with its diminution of detail. Portrait of a Lady in a Landscape is typical of the small-scale single figures and “conversation pieces” in which Devis specialized all his life. His well-ordered and refined style appealed greatly to the growing middle class, which he often portrayed indoors or outdoors at leisure. His sitters exude a watchfulness and an awareness that are both slightly disturbing as well as charming. Although his repertory of poses was limited and his figures are sometimes stilted, his works nevertheless possess an unassuming charm and delicacy.  —Dena M. Woodall