[3] Born in the south-east of Ireland, he was one of a set of twins; his father, James Danby, farmed a small property he owned near Wexford, but his death, in 1807, caused the family to move to Dublin, while Francis was still a schoolboy.

At Bristol they made a pause, and Danby, finding he could get trifling sums for watercolours, remained there working diligently and sending to the London exhibitions pictures of importance.

[9][11] The Bristol artists, particularly the amateur Francis Gold, were also important in influencing Danby towards a more imaginative and poetical style.

[13] In 1820 when Francis Danby exhibited The Upas Tree of Java at the British Institution, Cumberland used his influence to promote its favourable reception.

[6] Letitia Elizabeth Landon included a poem on this work in Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures, part of her collection, The Troubadour (1825).

He left Bristol for London, and in 1828 exhibited his Opening of the Sixth Seal at the British Institution, receiving from that body a prize of 200 guineas; and this picture was followed by two others on the theme of the Apocalypse.

[5] Danby painted "vast illusionist canvases" comparable to those of John Martin – of "grand, gloomy and fantastic subjects which chimed exactly with the Byronic taste of the 1820s.

[5] Danby exhibited his large (15 feet wide) and powerful The Deluge that year; the success of that painting, "the largest and most dramatic of all his Martinesque visions,"[21] revitalised his reputation and career.

Some of Danby's later paintings, like The Woodnymph's Hymn to the Rising Sun (1845), tended toward a calmer, more restrained, more cheerful manner than those in his earlier style; but he returned to his early mode for The Shipwreck (1859).