Charles Towneley

Charles Townley or Towneley (1737–January 3, 1805 [cite book|title=The Every Day Book of History and Chronology|publisher=D. Appleton & co|author=Joel Munsell|year=1858] ), 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 [http://www.burnley.gov.uk/towneley/|] , 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 dealer in antiquities 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 [http://www.burnley.gov.uk/towneley/collections/parkst/ ] by Johan Zoffany of Townley in his London house surrounded by an imaginary arrangement of his sculptures. [ In August 1781 Townley wrote to James Byres, the antiquary and dealer in Rome, that "Mr Zoffany is painting, in the Stile of his Florence tribune, a room in my house, wherein he introduces what Subjects he chuses in my collection. It will be a picture of extraordinary effect & truth..." (Kitto 2005).] Engaged in discussion with him are three fellow connoisseurs, the palaeographer Charles Astle, Hon. Charles Francis Greville, F.R.S., and Pierre-François Hugues D'Hancarville. Prominent in front are Townley's Roman marble of the "Discobolos", [It was discovered at Hadrian's Villa in 1790 and purchased by Towneley in 1792; it was such an important addition to the Towneley marbles that Zoffany was called in to add it to the painting. The head looking forward was a controversial restoration.] the "Nymph with a Shell", of which the most famous variant was also in the Borghese collection [Now at the Musée du Louvre.] and a "Faun" of the Barberini type. On a pedestal 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" [Towneley purchased it directly from the Laurenzano family in Naples in July 1772 for 530 ducats (Kitto 2005)] 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. [Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981 "Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900", p 68.] 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 [Haskell and Penny 1981:68.] 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.

Notes

References

*1911
*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. [http://www.burnley.gov.uk/towneley/whatson/charles_towneley/Townley_Marbles_v1.pdf]
* [http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC61914510&id=j2MDAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage&dq=greek+sculpture&as_brr=1#PPA33,M1 Sir Henry Ellis: "The Townley Gallery of Classic Sculpture in the British Museum" 1846.]
* [http://www.jstor.org/view/00076287/ap030431/03a00270/0 Nicholas Penny, 'Exhibition Review - Townley at the B. M. and Cavaceppi at the Clarendon Gallery'] , "The Burlington Magazine", 1984, p55