A painter who was one of the five sons of Thomas Forbes Walmisley (1783–1866), a London-born organist, composer and ‘Professor of Music’, who also had at least two daughters.
Walmisley trained at the Royal Academy schools and according to Redgrave’s dictionary was also a pupil of H. P. Briggs. Redgrave also says that he ‘became paralysed in his legs early in life’ and that his works ‘were very mannered from want of power to study’. He nonetheless exhibited 21 at the Academy between 1838 and 1868, 18 at the British Institution between 1841 and its closure in 1867 and 16/17 at the Society of British Artists (SBA) during 1840–1872. The majority were landscapes and subject paintings, the latter often derived from literature and drama but the first five at the Academy (to 1841) were portraits.
Walmisley appears not to have married, and lived with his father and his two unmarried sisters. From some point before 1840 this was at 18 Cowley Street, Westminster, but probably from 1843 until 1846 he was in Rome. According to Graves’s Royal Academy listings, a Roman view he sent home in 1843/1844 was noted as ‘painted on the spot’ when submitted for the 1844 Academy show by his father. In the 1844 catalogue itself, his Rome address is given as Café Graeco and, in 1845, Via di Capo le Cose. From then on, Italian subjects from Venice to the Naples area predominate in his exhibition record, including after his return to London in 1847.
In about 1864 he and his father moved to 19 Earl’s Court Gardens, Brompton. His father died there aged 84 in 1866, leaving an estate of under £1,500, Frederick being executor. He died at St John’s Wood on 25th December 1875, aged 60.
Two of Walmisley’s brothers were organists. The eldest, Thomas Attwood Walmisley (1814–1856), became Professor of Music at Cambridge University in 1836. The other was Henry (1830–1857), an organist in London. Frederick’s portraits of them both were lent by their civil engineer brother, Arthur Thomas Walmisley (1847–1923), to the Victorian Era Exhibition of 1897 at Earl’s Court. The fifth brother, Horatio (1827–1905), became a clergyman. Frederick is also recorded in published RIBA papers for 1868–1869 to have done a ‘remarkably good portrait in oil’ of the architect Arthur Ashpitel, ‘representing him sitting and sketching’, of unknown date. (Ashpitel also studied in Rome from 1853.)
While Walmisley was only baptised Frederick (on 26th May 1815 at St Mary, Newington, Surrey) some contemporary and later printed references call him ‘F. W.’ or ‘Frederick W.’ which is seemingly an error.
