Details of Sculptor

Surname

Devall

Alternative Surname

First Name

John II

Initial of Surname

D

Year of Birth/Baptism

1728

Flourished

Year of Death

1794

Biographical Details

The son of John Devall I, he was admitted to the Masons’ Company by patrimony on 9 January 1777. He was already involved in the family business by 1768, for in May that year he received payment for a finely decorated chimneypiece with foliage decoration for Coventry House (2). Devall II was much employed by the Crown and succeeded his father as master-mason to the royal palaces on the latter’s death in 1774. In 1784 he became master of the Masons’ Company. Before 1790 he had taken his son, John Devall III, into partnership.
Devall II was the mason-contractor responsible for the north and south fronts of Somerset House, 1777-1786; Coutts’ bank, Strand, 1780-1789; the King’s Bench prison, 1780-l784 (£4,590); the house for the marshal of the prison, 1781-1782 (£546); Argyll House, 1783; the government building next to the Admiralty, l786-l791 (£1,875); the temple at Audley End, 1791( £300) and the new guardroom at St James’s Palace, 1793. He was also paid £1,536 for building the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s house in Downing Street.
He was employed on additions or repairs to Cobham Hall, Kent, 1776-78; at Audley End, 1785, where he was paid £790, and at 4 St James’s Square, London where he was paid a considerable sum by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn for unspecified mason’s work. His firm carried out rich and extensive carving featuring foliage and angels for the Royal Chapel at Greenwich in 1788 (17). In the records of Carlton House, where he also worked, he was recorded as ‘Mr Duval, of Mortimer Street, Cavendish-square’(9) (Pyne 1819, v3, n 12).
Between 1784 and 1789 he and Richard Lawrence rebuilt the Queen Mary block of Greenwich Palace following its destruction by fire. His bill, which included 3,366 feet of Portland Stone and ‘10 waggon loads of marble bases and capitals’ came to £2,347 5s 8d (TNA ADM 68/813). In 1791-92 he carried out work at Woburn Abbey for a total sum of £1,653. Devall and his son also worked at Somerset House after 1790, receiving payments totalling £1,756 11s 2d.
Devall executed his own designs and those of others. In 1772 John Carr, the architect, wrote to the Duke of Portland ‘The dining room at Burlington House [in York?] will be pretty near finished by Xmas. Did Your Grace speak to Deval about a chimneypiece for it? ... There should also be one for the drawing room of about £60 value. If your Grace have not given the order for them it would be well to give Deval a line and refer him to my drawing for the model for the dining room chimney and leave the design of the drawing room to himself’ (Portland Archives in GPC). Devall is also known to have sold the work of other sculptors through his shop: in a letter to Jacob Houblon of Hallingbury of 1775, Henry Watson referred to a mosaic table of his making, which could be seen at Devall’s shop in Little Portland Street.
He must have had a number of assistants: two of his employees were John Gilliam and a mason, Henry Young. The latter had worked for the practice for 15 years when, working on a royal palace on 8 October 1785, he fell 33 feet from a ladder sustaining acute injuries and leaving his wife and children without support.
Devall produced a large number of high quality chimneypieces in competition with a neighbour, R Maile. In 1786 John Carr wrote (again) to the Duke of Portland about a house he was designing: ‘I do not attempt to mark out the chimneypieces for the rooms because Your Grace may see a variety of patterns at Mr. Devall’s or at Mr. Mails at the end of Great Portland Street’ (Portland Archives in GPC).
The workshop was also responsible for at least one monument, to Thomas Spackman (1). Gunnis described the 18 foot high edifice with its life-size statue of Spackman, as ‘exciting and arresting’ and declared that Devall ‘was undoubtedly a fine artist in the best English tradition’ (Gunnis 1968, 129). It is possible, given the absence of any comparable production by the workshop, that Devall, like Thomas Carter II, sub-contracted figurative work on this scale to one of the more able sculptors of the day. This does not however diminish his achievement. The work depicts the energetic and heroic figure of Spackman, his arm outstretched in a gesture of blessing. At his feet lies a straw basket of carpenter’s tools, while to left and right stand a boy and a girl, pupils of the charity school he endowed out of the fortune he made as a carpenter. More emblems of his trade are shown in relief at the base of the monument.
Devall was a figure of some note in his time and appears to have made a considerable fortune. In 1788 when Horace Walpole sought among his contemporaries for a craftsman comparable to Robert Taylor I (†1742), he alighted on Devall: Taylor, he wrote, was ‘the greatest stone-mason of his time: like Devall in the present day, he got a vast deal of money; but again, unlike him altogether, he could not keep what he got’ (GM, 1788, 930). Devall was evidently a shrewd money manager.
He died in 1794 and his will, a document of some length and complexity, was proved on 12 April that year. He left his recently furnished house at Upper Clapton to his wife, Ann, and the premises in Little Portland Street to his elder son, John. The workshops were clearly extensive for Devall refers to the ‘shops, sheds, yards, gardens, backsides and tenements’ in the grounds. In addition Devall left a property with lands and gardens at Heyford, Northants, to the same two beneficiaries. The will also mentions his younger children, Robert, Elizabeth, Susannah, Jane and Henrietta.
MGS
Literary References: Pyne 1819, v3, 12n; Gunnis 1968, 129; Colvin V, 1973-76, 466; VI, 39; Harris 2001, 61
Archival References: Masons’ Co, Freemen , fol 13; Court Book 1751-96 (14 June 1784); Chambers/Somerset Hse, 25 Dec 1776-25 Dec 1777, fol 52,53; Essex RO D/DBY.A.222; GP
Will: PROB 11/1244