Francis William Topham

Moving employment to James Sprent Virtue, he engraved landscapes after William Henry Bartlett and Thomas Allom.

[2] His career as watercolourist appears to have started self-taught, helped by practice at the meetings of the Artists' Society in Clipstone Street.

He was in 1850 one of Charles Dickens's company of actors (the "splendid strollers") in The Rent Day of Douglas Jerrold and Bulwer Lytton's Not so bad as we seem.

[1] Topham's earliest exhibited work was The Rustic's Meal, which appeared at the Royal Academy in 1832, and was followed in 1838, 1840, and 1841 by three paintings in oil-colours.

He retired, however, in 1847, and in 1848 was elected a member of the (Old) Society of Painters in Watercolours, to which he contributed a Welsh view near Capel Curig, and a subject from the Irish ballad of Rory O'More.

In the autumn of 1860 he paid a return visit to Ireland, and in 1861 exhibited The Angel's Whisper and Irish Peasants at the Holy Well.