Charles Towne

Charles Towne was born in 1763 near Wigan, England. He received early training from the landscape painter John Rathbone in Leeds, and later trained under a coach painter in Manchester, where he developed skills in heraldic painting. By around 1780 he was working as a japanner and decorative painter in Liverpool. He exhibited his first recorded picture in 1786 at the Society for Promoting the Arts of Painting and Design in Liverpool, a forerunner of the Liverpool Academy.

Towne moved to London and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1799 to 1812, and at the British Institution until 1823. He returned to Liverpool around 1810, became a member of the Liverpool Academy, and served as its Vice-President in 1812 and 1813.

Towne died on 6 January 1840, at the age of 77. The UK Government Art Collection records the cause as dropsy and the place of death as Liverpool, a location corroborated by Wikimedia Commons' catalogue data. Other sources give London instead, including the German-language Wikipedia, whose narrative text and infobox disagree with each other, and the auction database Art.Salon. No contemporary obituary or newspaper death notice has been located to resolve the discrepancy, so the place of death should be treated as documented but not fully settled.

Critical assessment of Towne's painting is thin in the available modern record. Christie's specialist notes describe him as "one of the leading horse portraitists of his period," a reputation built on steady exhibition at the Royal Academy and the British Institution and on his standing within the Liverpool Academy. No broader modern critical literature on his painting has been confirmed in the available record.

The highest documented auction result for Charles Towne is a pair of hunting scenes, A dark bay Hunter with a terrier in a landscape and A saddled black hunter in a landscape, which sold for USD 63,000 at Christie's New York in an Old Masters sale in May 2024; the exact day of sale is not confirmed in the available record. Other documented results include Animal Studies, signed Chas. Towne / Pinxit 1814, which realized USD 4,800 at Doyle (sale date and city not confirmed in the lot record), and a Pair of Pointers that sold for USD 1,344.38 at Heritage Auctions on 7 December 2007, a figure Heritage itself labels only as its own internal record for the artist. Because comprehensive multi-house sales data for Towne could not be confirmed, the USD 63,000 Christie's result should be read as the highest documented figure found rather than a verified global all-time high. Separately, dealer marketplaces such as 1stDibs also list works attributed to Towne at a range of asking prices, but these are private asking prices, not auction results, and should not be conflated with market value.

There is no catalogue raisonne of Charles Towne's work, and authentication rests on dealer and auction-house connoisseurship rather than a scholarly reference catalogue. His name also appears in the historical record signed as "Chas. Towne," and there is no evidence of a second, unrelated artist trading under the same name in the fine art market, so buyers should not expect a naming ambiguity beyond that period abbreviation. The auction record for Towne is thin and inconsistent rather than absent: the handful of documented sales range from about USD 1,300 to USD 63,000 across three different houses, and a single "record" figure circulating for this artist should be treated with caution until it can be checked against a full multi-house sales database. His institutional presence, including 127 works catalogued across UK public collections by Art UK plus holdings at the Tate and the British Museum, is a better guide to his historical standing than any single auction result.