Thomas Frederick William Alban was born in St Petersburg, Russia, on 3 March 1887 and, apart from a period of study at the Slade School where he learned anatomy from Sir Frank Calderon, nothing is known of his early years or training. It appears he served in the Indian Army before he came to Australia. The titles of some of the works he exhibited in the Queensland Art Society’s annual exhibitions in 1924 and 1925, Black leopard and white peacock and Baloo , suggest a more exotic location. In 1925 he served on the Queensland Art Society committee and also received a prize for a landscape in oils at the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association August exhibition. Alban later worked as a tutor in the Art Training Institute, Melbourne, in the late 1930s when Olive Ashworth was enrolled as a student. In the early 1950s he was well regarded for his instructions in anatomy at the East Sydney Technical School. He was an artist employed by Essex Ware around 1955, who signed his name on many items. Essexware (1953-57) was produced by English migrants, Gordon and Irene Dunstan at Gladstone Road, Leura in the Blue Mountains for a period of four years in the early to mid 1950s. The name Essexware was coined from Essex, the English county of origin of Irene Dunstan. They are popular collectables because of the Aboriginal themes and designs which were made before the appropriation of the style of other cultures was rightly criticised, and illegal in the case of outright copying.