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Figure and landscape painter, born in Shipley Moor, Yorkshire, who refused to exploit his art to live, shunning dealers and critics, believing that his pictures were sufficient without their promotion and interpretation. Davy studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1943–5, during its wartime relocation to Oxford, also taking lectures in philosophy. It remained his life’s preoccupation. His father Hubert, who taught art, and his mother Dorothy, daughter of the artist Henry Thurlow Hunt, were Theosophists. Apart from John Latham and Kyffin Williams, Leo’s close friends were philosophers rather than artists: John Tucker, who became professor of philosophy at Waterloo University in Canada and R D Laing, author of Self and Other and Knots.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


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