John Warrington Wood, 'Sir Austen Henry Layard', 1881

Austen Henry Layard commissioned this marble bust of himself from the sculptor John Warrington Wood in 1881. It was remodelled from a bust sculpted by Wood in London in 1869, which was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy . Layard was evidently not pleased with the 1869 bust and had this version made 12 years later. It is chiselled ‘AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD’ across the front and ‘J. Warrington Wood / Sculpt Roma 1881’ across the lower right edge. Wood was in Rome at the time sculpting a bust of Enid Guest, Layard’s wife.

Layard was a very colourful character. Born on 5 March 1817 in a hotel on the Left Bank in Paris, the son of Henry Layard, an amateur of the arts, and Marianne Austen, a banker’s daughter, he was largely brought up in Florence and spoke fluent Italian. His first contact with art is said to have been hurling a shoe at Filippino Lippi’s The Virgin and Child with Saints Jerome and Dominic, having aimed it at his brother.

He was sent to school in England and qualified as an attorney but found the work so boring that he decided to ride across the Ottoman Empire and Persia to Ceylon, where he had relatives. In Constantinople Layard heard rumours of ‘palaces underground’ at Nimrud and determined to dig there. On the first day of his excavation he discovered the palace of Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned in Assyria from 883 to 859 BC. Most of his massive finds from Nimrud and Nineveh made during the years 1845–51 now form the greater part of the British Museum’s collection of Assyrian antiquities.

Layard’s excavations in Assyria made his name while he was still only in his early thirties. His best-selling first book Nineveh and its Remains (1849) made him famous overnight and was followed by Nineveh and Babylon (1853). He entered Parliament and held Cabinet office; served as ambassador in Madrid and Constantinople; became a Trustee of the National Gallery; and built up a large collection of paintings, most of which he bequeathed to the National Gallery.

Layard began collecting paintings in 1855, purchasing three fragments from a fresco by Spinello Aretino. He frequently returned to Italy and eventually retired to Venice. His collection was mainly of works by Italian artists, particularly those of the early Renaissance, known at the time as ‘primitives’. Among his pictures were Bramantino’s Adoration of the Kings and Tura’s Allegory.

Layard was impetuous and far from diplomatic by nature. He was a friend of both Sir Charles Eastlake, the first Director of the National Gallery, and Lady Eastlake. His name was put forward after Eastlake’s death in 1865 as a possible Director, but the much less flamboyant William Boxall was appointed to the position and Layard was instead made a Trustee of the National Gallery. He was knighted in 1878 and served the Gallery for nearly 30 years until his death in 1894.