David Devant was a member of the famous Maskelyne & Cooke company and performed regularly at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. In 1905 he became a partner with John Nevil Maskelyne. He was succeeded by Oswald Williams. Devant is revered by magicians as  an inventor and performer whose stature led to him being invited three  times to participate in Royal Command Performances. He was droll,  engaging and a master of grand illusion and platform magic. The wit of  his patter marked a departure from the pseudo scientific style of  earlier conjurors. This humour can still delight, as evidenced by stage  lines he includes in the treatise he wrote with Nevil Maskelyne, Our Magic. It has been claimed that Queen Alexandra laughed aloud during Devant's "A Boy, Girl and Eggs" routine at the  first of his Royal Command Performances, where an assistant from the  audience was given the (losing) task of keeping track of a bewildering  number of eggs plucked from an empty hat by the magician.
 Critics of Devant claim  many of the items in his repertoire were elaborated sketches in which  the magical element was insufficient to justify the staging. In its day, however, Devant's magic was the talk of London. He was already a  top-of-the-bill music hall star when he began sharing the stage with  John Neville Maskelyne in 1893. In 1904, the two moved to St George's Hall, and their official business and professional partnership was established soon afterwards. It was to prosper for ten years.
Maskelyne and Devant's House of Magic became famous all over the  world, and was the showcase for the premier magicians of the day,  including Paul Valadon, Charles Bertram and Bautier de Kolta. In "My Magic Life", Devant says that their theatre was "the veritable headquarters of the conjurer's art".
Milbourne Christopher in his textbook on conjuring history, Panorama of Magic, says that: "David Devant, most British magicians agree, was the master  performer of his time". Devant was a fixture in British entertainment  and it was he who was selected to represent "the world of wizardry" at  King George V's command performance at the Palace Theatre in London on 1 July 1912. Devant made headlines not long after when an escaped mental  patient cornered him in London and insisted that the conjurer pull coins from the air as he had been seen to do on stage. Devant did so until  attendants arrived from the hospital to take the disturbed spectator  away.
Devant was a pioneer of early cinema in London and introduced the theatrograph into the Egyptian Hall show, acquiring one of the first projectors ever made out of his own pocket. The theatrograph was invented by Robert Paul.
Devant was still at the peak of his profession when his health began  to fail during the war years, until the consequences of "paralysis  agitans," as he identifies it in his autobiography, forced him to retire in 1920.

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