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John Scarlett Davis was an English landscape, portrait, and architectural painter, and lithographer born on September 1, 1804, in Leominster, England. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London, and began exhibiting his works at the annual Royal Academy shows in 1825.

Davis painted portraits, landscapes, and church interiors, and developed a distinctive specialty in painting the interiors of art galleries. His picture The Interior of the British Institution Gallery (1829) records a collection of Old Masters. He lithographed and published twelve heads from studies by Rubens, and in 1832 some views of Bolton Abbey, drawn from nature on stone. He also painted the interiors of the Louvre. Between 1842 and 1845 he was commissioned to draw copies of the paintings in the collections of the British royal palaces.

He was also commissioned to paint an interior of the Vatican, Vatican City and of the Escurial in Spain, and an interior of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

His works are in a number of public and private collections, with several in each of the National Museum Cardiff, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Hereford Museum and Art Gallery, Leominster Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Yale Center for British Art. A major exhibition of his work was held at Hereford in 1937. A number of his letters are held by Herefordshire Libraries and Information Service.

He died on September 29, 1845, in London, England.

James Thomas Davis, a wealthy Square Mile entrepreneur, and a contractor was born on January 31, 1861, in Ontario.

He was involved in important construction projects such as canals, piers, and bridges, often government commissions. His firm built several portions of the Lachine Canal in Montreal and salvaged the Quebec Bridge venture, rebuilding the substructure after the 1907 collapse. His father William Davis had founded the firm in Ottawa; his sons Michael and James joined it after studies in engineering.

In 1891, he married Gertrude Marie Devlin and raised three daughters and three sons. They also maintained a large household staff of a cook, housekeepers, maids, manservants, and governess. This large household and the client’s social position were to be validated in a particularly imposing residence. Davis commissioned Montreal architects Edward and William Maxwell to design a mansion, which resulted in one of the Maxwells’ most imposing residential designs, an Elizabethan Tudor style edifice of red brick on Drummond Street. Davis acted as a general contractor and built the house himself, ensuring the use of modern technology, while the architects called upon a team of artisans and artists for decoration, furniture, painting, sculpture, wallpapering and stained glass windows.

In 1955, McGill purchased the Davis House from his widow. It is now the home of the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy of McGill University.

He died on October 2, 1928, in Montreal, Quebec.