Printmaker and painter Colonel Robert Charles Goff RE (1837–1922) specialised in topographical scenes and as an etcher he was strongly influenced by the work of James McNeill Whistler. Born in Ireland, Goff achieved the rank of colonel in the Coldstream Guards, having fought in the Crimean War and in Ceylon. He retired in 1878 to concentrate on his art and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1887.
Goff lived in London and Brighton but travelled extensively. He moved in the 1890s to a villa overlooking Florence and where he wrote about the area with his second wife, The Hon Clarissa Catherine de Hochepied-Larpent, sister of the artist George Percy Jacomb-Hood.
During the First World War he moved to Villa Valerie, Bellaria, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland where he died in 1922.
