Charles Towneley

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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, in the West End of London, 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 conversation piece [2] by Johan Zoffany of Townley with three friends in his London house surrounded by an imaginary arrangement of his sculptures.^[1] Prominent in front are Townley's Roman marble of the Discobolos,^[2] the Nymph with a Shell, of which the most famous variant was also in the Borghese collection^[3] and the Barberini Faun. On a pedestalm in front of the fireplace, the Boys Fighting from the Barberini collection had been Towneley's first major purchase, in 1768: Winckelmann had identified it as a lost original by Polyclitus. In point of fact, Towneley's only Greek original appears to have been the grave relief on the left wall above the Bust of a Maenad posed on a wall bracket. The so-called Bust of Clytie^[4] perches on the small writing-table, in Zoffany's assembly of the Townley marbles: it was extensively reproduced in marble, plaster, and the white bisque porcelain called parian ware for its supposed resemblance to Parian marble. Goethe owned two casts of this.^[5] The Townley Venus on a Roman well-head that serves as drum pedestal had been discovered by Gavin Hamilton at Ostia and quietly shipped out of the Papal States as two fragmentary pieces^[6] The marble "Towneley Vase", also furtively exported, stands on the bookcase at the rear: it was excavated about 1774 by Gavin Hamilton at Monte Cagnolo.

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

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[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]
• Sir Henry Ellis: The Townley Gallery of Classic Sculpture in the British Museum 1846.