Biographical Information

Heather St. Clair Davis
British 1937-1999

Heather St Clair Davis was one of the most gifted artists and skilled horsewomen of her era. Born in Whittington, in the Cotswolds, Heather was brought up amid horses and art. After graduating in art at Cheltenham, she set out for America. She fulfilled a lifetime ambition when she and her husband crossed the Atlantic in a converted cutter, with the small matter of a hurricane wrecking the ship off the coast of Northern Spain not deterring them in any way. They rebuilt the boat, and cruised the Caribbean for a year before settling in Vermont in the early 1960's. Heather lived for years on an isolated Vermont farm without electricity or water, raising three children virtually on her own. She taught art in local schools, and in the 70's, after twelve years of teaching, she decided to paint professionally.

Over the years, she established a distinguished reputation as a leading equine artist. Heather’s outstanding ability as a painter of landscape and her professional knowledge of horses, gained at first hand over many years, were fundamental to her success as an artist.

She pursued an equally successful career as a horsewoman and was well known as an International and Three-Day Event Dressage Judge. She bred Event horses and in her fifties took up eventing again to prove a horse she sold was not as unbiddable in terms of training as suggested by the purchaser. A strong and vigorous outlook enabled her to pursue a life which wove together her two great skills and passions, for art and horses.
Heather taught art and painted for many years in America, but she returned to England for her best subjects: hunting scenes, racehorses exercising, the excitement of steeple-chasing or flat racing, horses hacking home after a morning ride or quietly grazing in a sweeping Gloucestershire landscape.
When Doctors told her in 1995 that she had six months, she showed just how formidable a character she was, her last wish granted in the form of her daughter being married at the family farm four years later. She passed from this world a few short months after, the headstone she designed simply says, “She tried.”

Her work was inspired and original, and for every painting she had a story. In a review of Heather’s second exhibition with Frost & Reed in London in 1989, Walter Summers wrote: Times change and in response produce the man or woman to record them. Edwards and Munnings have left the scene. On the evidence here, we need not fear a vacuum.