Researching Edward Calvert

He was born in Appledore, near Bideford in Devon, and after a spell in the Navy, studied art at Plymouth and the Royal Academy Schools (1824). His early visionary work was greatly inspired by William Blake, and he became a member of the Blake-influenced group known as The Ancients which met at Samuel Palmer's in Shoreham, Kent in the later 1820s and early 1830s.

Amongst Calvert's finest works are exquisite miniature wood engravings which date from this early period; his wood and copper engravings all date from 1827–31, but were only seen by friends until published by his son in 1893 in an edition of 350. He also made etchings. In 1844 he visited Greece.

Much of his subsequent life was spent with his wife Mary, in Dalston and nearby Hackney, a short distance from London. His work from this later period (not considered his best) shows a Classical influence.

Edward Calvert and his wife are buried at Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, London; the headstone reads He was welcomed in Helicon.

The British Museum has some 65 of his drawings, and about 40 prints, as well as many of the printing blocks and plates for them.

His third son. Samuel Calvert, was an engraver and painter active in Australia and produced a memoir of his father in 1893.

Calvert's work appears to have been exclusively confined to Edinburgh, and was mostly concerned with the creation of Baronial tenements (particularly in Marchmont) and villas in the Second Empire and Jacobean styles. He is responsible for a varied selection of villas on or in the vicinity of Colinton Road in Merchiston; one of these was for many years the home of author Dorothy Dunnett. He is also known to have designed modifications for at least one New Town building, in Abercromby Place, in 1899.