About
Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum is one of the finest municipal art galleries in the North of England, housed in a magnificent medieval and Tudor manor house set within a large country park on the southern edge of Burnley. Opened as a public museum in 1903 when the Corporation of Burnley purchased the hall and its surrounding parkland, Towneley Hall combines a distinguished art collection of national significance with displays of local history, natural history, and decorative arts that together celebrate the rich heritage of the Burnley district and wider Lancashire.
The hall itself is a building of exceptional historical interest, its medieval core dating to the fourteenth century and incorporating Tudor, Jacobean, and eighteenth-century additions that chart the architectural evolution of a great Lancashire family house across five centuries. The Towneley family — one of the most distinguished Catholic gentry families of northern England — occupied the hall for over five hundred years, accumulating the art, furniture, and cultural objects that became the foundation of the public collection after their departure. The building is an outstanding example of the accretion of periods and styles that characterises many great English country houses, and its interior spaces range from medieval great hall to Georgian drawing rooms of considerable elegance.
The art collection is the jewel of Towneley Hall, with particular strengths in Old Masters and eighteenth-century British portraits that place it among the more significant provincial collections in England. Works by notable European masters of the seventeenth century are displayed alongside important British paintings including portraits by leading eighteenth-century artists. The collection also includes fine examples of decorative arts — furniture, ceramics, silver, and textiles — accumulated by the Towneley family and subsequent donors across more than a century of public collecting.
The Towneley family's most celebrated member was Charles Townley (1737–1805) — a connoisseur and collector of antiquities who assembled one of the finest collections of Graeco-Roman sculpture in eighteenth-century Britain. Although the Townley Marbles themselves were purchased by the British Museum after his death, where they remain a celebrated highlight of that institution, the hall's displays explore Charles Townley's life and collecting activities, and some related material connects the hall to this extraordinary story of eighteenth-century connoisseurship.
The surrounding 200-acre country park provides one of the largest areas of public green space in Burnley, with woodland walks, a craft centre, and the Hall's natural history collections spilling into interpretation of the parkland ecology.
Categories:
Highlights
The Art Collection — Old Masters and British Portraits
Towneley Hall's art collection is one of the finest and most surprising in the North of England — a municipal collection of genuine national quality with particular strengths in Old Master paintings of the seventeenth century and British portraits of the eighteenth century. European works of considerable quality are displayed alongside important British paintings by leading Georgian artists, creating a collection that would not be out of place in a major metropolitan gallery.
The collection has been assembled through the generosity of donors over more than a century of public collecting and includes items of significant art historical importance.
Charles Townley and the Townley Marbles
The most celebrated member of the Towneley family was Charles Townley (1737–1805), whose collection of Graeco-Roman sculpture — assembled during the Grand Tour and through decades of passionate connoisseurship — was among the finest in eighteenth-century Britain. Although the Townley Marbles themselves were purchased by the British Museum after his death, where they constitute a major section of that institution's classical antiquities collections, the hall explores Townley's collecting activities through contemporary portraits, documents, and related material.
The hall displays an important portrait of Townley with his collection and examines his circle of scholarly and aristocratic friends, including Josiah Wedgwood.
The Medieval and Tudor Hall Architecture
Towneley Hall is a building of exceptional architectural interest, its fabric spanning more than five hundred years of construction and modification. The medieval great hall at the core of the building dates from the fourteenth century and retains its original open-timber roof — a remarkable survival in a house that has been continuously occupied and modified across the centuries.
Tudor and Jacobean additions gave the hall its characteristic external appearance, while Georgian alterations created more comfortable and elegant interiors in the principal reception rooms.
Walking through the building is a lesson in the complex architectural history of a great English country house.
Lancashire Antiquities and Local History
The museum's local history and archaeology collections document the history of Burnley and the surrounding East Lancashire district from prehistoric times to the recent past.
Lancashire Roman material, medieval finds, and industrial-era objects are displayed alongside photographs, documents, and personal testimonies that capture the character of life in this corner of the north across many centuries. The collections are particularly rich in material relating to the Lancashire textile and coal mining industries that dominated the local economy from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, providing context for understanding Burnley's development into a major Victorian industrial town.
Collections
The Art Collection
Permanent display of the hall's Old Master and British portrait collections in the principal gallery spaces, with supporting interpretation on the history of individual works and their acquisition for the Burnley municipal collection.
The Towneley Family: Five Centuries in Lancashire
A comprehensive family history display tracing the Towneleys from their medieval origins through the Civil War, the Reformation, and the Penal Laws to the sale of the estate in the early twentieth century. Includes portraits, documents, and the story of Charles Townley and the Townley Marbles.
Lancashire Life: Social and Industrial History
Local and social history galleries covering the history of Burnley and East Lancashire from prehistory to the twentieth century, with particular depth on the textile and coal mining industries, the growth of the Victorian town, and the lives of ordinary Lancashire families.
Current Exhibitions
An exhibition celebrating the contribution of women artists from Lancashire and the North West to British art history, drawing on the hall's own collection and loans from partner institutions to present work that has often been overlooked or undervalued in the standard art historical canon.