Walter Howell Deverell (1827 - 1854)

A member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in all but name, born in Charlottesville, Virginia, the son of a teacher from England. The family returned to England in 1829, with Walter Deverell senior finally becoming secretary-assistant to William Dyce at the Government School of Design in 1842.

An unwilling solicitor's clerk, young Walter persuaded his father to allow him to attend Sass's Academy in Bloomsbury, where he met Rossetti: they instantly became close friends. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1846. A participant in the Cyclographic Society meetings of 1848, it is strange that Deverell was not included as a founder member of the Brotherhood. His name is mentioned frequently in the P. R. B. journal and he was suggested as a replacement after Collinson's resignation in 1850, but this was never ratified.

In the winter of 1850-1851, Deverell lodged at 17 Red Lion Square (in rooms later taken by Burne-Jones and Morris) and shared the studio with Rossetti, but he completed few substantial paintings.

He moved to Kew in 1852, and became head of the household after the death of his father a year later (his mother had died in 1850), when he and his siblings were obliged to take a smaller house in Chelsea. By October 1853, Deverell was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's Disease, an ailment affecting the kidneys, and he died on 2 February 1854, three months after his twenty-sixth birthday.