Charles Towneley

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15:03, 30 September 2006 (UTC)15:03, 30 September 2006 (UTC)~~

This article is about a British archaeologist . For British officer of arms, see Charles Townley (officer of arms).

Charles Towneley (1737-1805), English antiquary and collector of marbles, was born at Towneley, the family seat, near Burnley in Lancashire, on the 1st of October 1737. (He regularly spelt his name Townley, so this is the spelling usually used in modern literature.) From a Catholic family and thus excluded both from public office and from English universities, he was educated at the college of Douai, and subsequently under John Turberville Needham, the physiologist and divine. In 1758 he took up his residence at Towneley Hall [1], where he lived the ordinary life of a country gentleman until 1767, when he left England on the Grand Tour, chiefly to Rome, which he also visited in 1772-3 and 1777. He also made several excursions to the south of Italy and Sicily. In conjunction with various dealers, including Gavin Hamilton, artist and antiquarian , and Thomas Jenkins, a banker in Rome, he got together a splendid collection of antiquities, which was deposited in 1778 in a house built for the purpose in Park Street, Westminster, where he died on the 8th of January 1805. His solitary publication was an account of a Roman cavalry helmet found at Ribchester.

The trustees of the British Museum obtained from parliament a grant of £20,000, probably not half the original cost; and for this sum his marbles and the larger bronzes and terracottas were purchased from the family in 1805, and still form the core of its Graeco-Roman collection. The small antiquities, including coins, gems, and pottery, followed in 1814.

He became the most famous member of the family and another of the treasures now at Towneley is a painting[2] by Johan Zoffany of Townley with three friends in his London house surrounded by an imaginary arrangement of sculptures.

A large archive of Townley's papers, including diaries, account books, bills, correspondence, and catalogues, was acquired by the British Museum in 1992.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Tony Kitto, "The celebrated connoisseur: Charles Townley, 1737-1805" Minerva Magazine May/June 2005, in connection with a British Museum exhibition clebrating the bicentennial of the Townley purchase. [3]