Charles Townley

Charles Townley FRS (1 October 1737 – 3 January 1805) was a wealthy English country gentleman, antiquary and collector. He travelled on three Grand Tours to Italy, buying antique sculpture, vases, coins, manuscripts and Old Master drawings and paintings. Many of the most important pieces from his collection, especially the Townley Marbles (or Towneley Marbles) are now in the British Museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The marbles were overshadowed at the time, and still today, by the Elgin Marbles.

Charles Townley was born in England at Towneley Hall, the family seat, near Burnley in Lancashire, on 1 October 1737. (He regularly spelt his name Townley, so this is the spelling usually used in modern literature for him, but still usually not for his marbles.) From a Catholic family and thus excluded both from public office and from English universities, he was educated at the English College, Douai, and subsequently under John Turberville Needham, the biologist and Roman Catholic priest.

In 1758 he took up his residence at Towneley Hall, where he lived the ordinary life of a country gentleman until 1765, when he left England on the Grand Tour, chiefly to Rome, which he also visited in 1772-1773 and 1777. He also made several excursions to the south of Italy and Sicily. In conjunction with various dealers, including Gavin Hamilton, and Thomas Jenkins, a dealer in antiquities in Rome, he got together a splendid collection of antiquities, known especially for the "Towneley Marbles" (or "Townley"), 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 8 January 1805.

His solitary publication was an account of the Ribchester Helmet in Vetusta Monumenta, a Roman cavalry helmet found near Towneley Hall, and now in the British Museum. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1791. He became a member of the Society of Dilettanti 1786, and made a trustee of the British Museum in 1791.

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