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Concept
Austen Henry Layard
Summary
Sir Austen Henry Layard (lɛərd; 5 March 1817 - 5 July 1894) was an English Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal. Most of his finds are now in the British Museum. He made a large amount of money from his best-selling accounts of his excavations.
He had a political career between 1852, when he was elected as a Member of Parliament, and 1869, holding various junior ministerial positions. He was then made ambassador to Madrid, then Constantinople, living much of the time in a palazzo he bought in Venice. During this period he built up a significant collection of paintings, which due to a legal loophole he had as a diplomat, he was able to extricate from Venice and bequeath to the National Gallery (as the Layard Bequest) and other British museums.
Layard was born in Paris, France, to a family of Huguenot descent. His father, Henry Peter John Layard, of the Ceylon Civil Service, was the son of Charles Peter Layard, Dean of Bristol, and grandson of Dr Daniel Peter Layard, a physician. His mother, Marianne, daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate, was of partial Spanish descent. His uncle was Benjamin Austen, a London solicitor and close friend of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1820s and 1830s. Edgar Leopold Layard the ornithologist was his brother.
On 9 March 1869 at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, Westminster, London he married his first cousin once removed, Mary Enid Evelyn Guest. Enid, as she was known, was the daughter of Sir Josiah John Guest and Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie. Their marriage was reportedly a happy one, and they never had any children.
Much of Layard's boyhood was spent in Italy, where he received part of his schooling, and acquired a taste for the fine arts and a love of travel from his father; but he was at school also in England, France and Switzerland.
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