The son of a Lancashire military officer, Thomas Walmsley (1763-1806) was born in Ireland while his family were stationed there. He worked as a scenery painter for Richard Daly's theatre in Dublin in the late 1780s, and throughout the 1790s he painted landscapes, mostly in Wales, although with occasional visits to Ireland. His works, which were chiefly painted in bodycolour (a term first used in France in the eighteenth century to describe a type of paint made from pigments bound in water-soluble gum, like watercolour, but with the addition of a white pigment in order to make it opaque), are recognisable for the "great luminousness of his skies" (Strickland, op. cit., p.501).