Henry Blundell (art collector)

Henry Blundell (1724 – 28 August 1810) was an English art collector, who amassed a large collection of art and antiquities at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire.

Henry Blundell was born in Britain in 1724 at Ince Blundell, Lancashire. A Roman Catholic, like his friend and fellow collector Charles Townley (who would encourage Blundell's collecting and introduced him to the antiquary Thomas Jenkins), he was thus barred from the British university system, and he was educated in France at the college of the English Jesuits at St Omer and the English College, Douai.

In 1760 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Mostyn, bt, of Talacre, Flintshire (commissioning her portrait from Joshua Reynolds).

In 1761 he had his family estates settled on him by his father. He also received a large inheritance from the death of a member of his mother's family without a male heir, further increased by income from his mother's estates and by his wife's death in 1767 and his father's death in 1773.

His high income from various sources enabled him to collect classical sculpture and old master paintings (including ones by or after Poussin, Ruisdael, Brueghel, Jacopo Bassano and Andrea del Sarto, and a copy of Veronese's The Wedding at Cana, commissioned during a visit to Paris), to improve Ince Blundell Hall and to buy and commission artworks from current artists like Richard Wilson, Canova, Gavin Hamilton and Anton Raphael Mengs.

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