Francis William Topham

Francis William Topham (Leeds 15 April 1808 – 31 March 1877 Córdoba) was an English watercolourist and engraver.

His early in life he was articled to an uncle who was a writing engraver. Around 1830 he came to London, and at first found employment in engraving coats-of-arms. He then entered the service of Messrs. Fenner & Sears, engravers and publishers. Moving employment to James Sprent Virtue, he engraved landscapes after William Henry Bartlett and Thomas Allom.

Topham first visited Ireland in 1844 and 1845, with Frederick Goodall and Alfred Fripp. 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. Towards the end of 1852 he went for a few months to Spain in search of the picturesque.

In the winter of 1876 Topham again went to Spain, dying in Córdoba in 1877, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery there.

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. In 1842 he was elected an associate of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours, of which he became a full member in 1843. 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. His earlier works consisted chiefly of representations of Irish peasant life and studies of Wales and her people. These were diversified in 1850 by a scene from Dickens' Barnaby Rudge.

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