[2] At the age of eleven, Davis won an award from the local society for the encouragement of the arts.

He lithographed and published twelve heads from studies by Rubens, and in 1832 some views of Bolton Abbey, drawn from nature on stone.

His watercolor of the collection of Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1835) shows the Turner pictures on the walls.

Between 1842 and 1845 he was commissioned to draw copies of the paintings in the collections of the British royal palaces.

He was in Florence in 1834, where he painted the interior of the Uffizi Gallery, and in Amsterdam in 1841 (sending the picture "Jack after a successful cruise, visiting his old comrades at Greenwich").