Francis Danby - Later Years

Later Years

In 1829 Danby's wife deserted him, running off with the painter Paul Falconer Poole. Danby left London, declaring that he would never live there again, and that the Academy, instead of aiding him, had, somehow or other, used him badly. For a decade he lived on the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland, becoming a Bohemian with boat-building fancies, painting only now and then. He later moved to Paris for a short period of time.

He returned to England in 1840, when his sons, James and Thomas, both artists, were growing up. 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," revitalized his reputation and career. Other pictures by him were The Golden Age (c. 1827, exhibited 1831), Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore (1837), and The Evening Gun (1848).

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). He lived his final years at Exmouth in Devon, where he died in 1861. Along with John Martin and J. M. W. Turner, Danby is considered among the leading British artists of the Romantic period.

Both of Danby's sons were landscape painters. The elder, James Francis Danby (1816–75), exhibited at the Royal Academy. "He excelled in depicting sunrise and sunset." The younger, Thomas Danby (1817–86), specialized in watercolors of Welsh scenes. In 1866, the latter was nominated as an Associate of the Royal Academy, but missed election by one vote.