Francis Towne

Francis Towne was a landscape painter from Middlesex. At the age of twelve or thirteen, he began a seven year apprenticeship with a coach-painter, Thomas Brookshead, in London, and later he studied under the court portraitist John Shackleton. Towne made his first tour of north Wales in 1777, before traveling to Italy in 1780, where he visited the Alps with John Warwick Smith. Later in his career, Towne made annual sketching tours to Wales, Devon and Cornwall.