Frederick Edward Joseph Goff was born in Upper Tooting, Wandsworth in 1866. He was the third child of William Goff, a grocer, and his wife Mary. According to the 1881 Census, Frederick Goff had started his professional life as a lithographic apprentice. By the 1891 census, his official profession had changed to Painter in Watercolours.
He married Augusta Pearce in 1894 and they had one daughter, Olive Bertha Goff.
He lived his entire life in South West London, moving to various addresses around Clapham, Tooting and Streatham. His lifelong London residence reflects his work as a painter; he predominantly painted topographical scenes in London, most typically architectural views from various London bridges.
Other locations occasionally depicted in his paintings include Cornwall, Salisbury and Northern France.
Frederick Joseph Goff exhibited at institutions between the period of 1891-1900. He entered three London watercolour scenes in the annual Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in 1900. All three pictures exhibited in 1900 were topographical London scenes; Charing Cross, London from Tower Bridge, and Fleet Street. He exhibited 13 paintings at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts between 1891-1897, many of them also London scenes, with occasional paintings of other British landscapes, including one painting of St Michael’s Mount Cornwall. He exhibited five paintings at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, where he was not a member.
Frederick Goff died aged 67 in 1933 in a Nursing Home in East Grinstead.
