DANBY, Francis (1793-1861), a painter of poetical landscape, who possesses some significance and importance in the English school, was born in the south of Ireland, November 16, 1793. His father farmed a small property he owned near Wexford, and Francis began life in the country, but the death of his father caused the family to remove to Dublin, while he was still a schoolboy, and there his bias to art very quickly developed itself, and superseded any other education. He began to practise drawing at the Royal Dublin Society’s schools; and under a Mr O’Connor, an erratic youth of his own age with national peculiarities, he began painting landscape. The capital of Ireland has never shown very much interest in the arts, but there was a youth then rising who afterwards made his mark in archaeology, if not in his profession of landscape painting, George Petrie, with whom Danby formed an acquaintance; and all three left for London together in 1813. This expedition, undertaken with very inadequate funds, and no aid, quickly came to an end and they had to get home again by walking all the way. At Bristol they made a pause, and Danby finding he could get trifling sums for water-colour drawings, remained there working diligently and sending to the London exhibitions pictures of importance. There his large pictures in oil quickly attracted attention. They were very powerful in effect and imaginative in invention; and, had his Upas Tree and the Delivery of the Israelites from Egypt been produced before a greater man, John Martin, had shown the way to express multitude, vastness, and fabulous wonders in architecture, Danby would be properly considered one of the great men in modern painting. The Upas Tree (1820), his most independent and original picture, is, however, a very ...