William Evans of Eton (1798-1877) was the drawing master of that public school in England and was an accomplished artist who exhibited widely in London, Dublin and Paris. He made a number of visits to the west of Ireland in 1835 and 1838 where he produced a lot of studies and finished watercolours, mostly of Counties Galway and Mayo, a mixture of picturesque landscapes, market and street scenes and what might be called peasant structures and peasant portraits. Some were of Galway City and many of Conamara. One cannot be sure what brought him out to ‘the wilds’ to that very rugged terrain which would have been remote and very adventurous for an English artist at that time. He liked the parts of Ireland least visited and said  that “Ireland failed to attract the pencils of the recording brethren of the easel and lay like a virgin soil untouched by the plough”.