This print of Francis Baily is a standard 19th-century portrait of an eminent Victorian. Thomas Phillips was one of the key portrait painters of his day and popular with explorers, scientists and poets alike.

Baily is best known today for the phenomenon he discovered observing an annular eclipse in 1836. At this eclipse he noticed a point as edge of the Moon and Sun appear to pass one another, a series of beads as sunlight reaches us through the uneven surface of the Moon. These beads have since come to be known as Baily's beads. This observation, and Baily's description of it are generally credited as initiating 19th century enthusiasm for eclipse expeditions. Certainly the turn out for the total eclipse of 1842 seems to support this.

Francis Baily was a close friend of John FW Herschel's and of the Herschel family as a whole. John and Margaret's second youngest daughter, Francisca is named after him (hence the slightly unusual spelling of her name) born in 1846 and many years before that, he worked with John to set up the [now Royal] Astronomical Society in London culminating in the establishment of that society in 1820.