Portrait of Francis William Locke Ross Esq., after 1850.

A portrait of Francis William Locke Ross, a notable collector and founder of a museum in Topsham. Lithograph by A. C. Chisholm after a marble bust by Joseph Durham, A.R.A, exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1850.  

Lithograph depicts a black and white image of a marble bust of a white middle-aged man looking to the left with ear-length curly hair. His shoulders are draped in a toga, pinned with a brooch on his right shoulder. Text underneath the print reads ‘A. C. CHISHOLM’. "Ross, Topsham" is written in pencil in the bottom right-hand corner.

Francis William Locke Ross (1793-1860), was a Royal Navy officer, who started collecting items of ethnography whilst serving as a midshipman aboard the HMS Tagus (his ‘Journal of the voyage of H.M.S. Tagus from England to the South Pacific, 1813-1814,’ is now held by the New York Public Library, MssCol 2632). In 1830 he retired from his naval career, and devoted the rest of his life to the collection and study of natural history specimens, later opening his home, Broadway House, in Topsham, Devon, as a public museum. Interest in Ross's collection seemed to be far-reaching. In 1868, The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland advertised  “local antiquities and fossils belonging to F. W. L. Ross, Esq., of Broadway House, Fore Street, open to the public on Mondays.”  One such item a visitor might have expected to see was specimen of the “P. Orca, Grampus. Occasionally in the Channel," listed in the Annual Reports and Transactions of the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society,  as "a young [specimen] 29 ½ inches in length, which was driven on shore at Exmouth in 1844.” 
After Ross's death in 1860, his wife donated his collection of over 160 items to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, including a specimen of a great black-headed gull (Ichthyaetus ichthyaetus). The bird was so rarely sighted in Britain that a local boatman, Mr William Pine, shot it down, later passing the specimen to Ross, who had it preserved.

Joseph Durham (1814-1877), was an English sculptor whose other sitters included Queen Victoria and the famous singer, Jenny Lind. 

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