Austen Henry Layard

The Right Honourable Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB PC
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
In office 12 February 1852 – 21 February 1852
Monarch	Queen Victoria
Prime Minister	Lord John Russell
Preceded by	The Lord Stanley of Alderley
Succeeded by	Lord Stanley
In office 15 August 1861 – 26 June 1866
Monarch	Queen Victoria
Prime Minister	The Viscount Palmerston The Earl Russell
Preceded by	The Lord Wodehouse
Succeeded by	Edward Egerton
First Commissioner of Works
In office 9 December 1868 – 26 October 1869
Monarch	Queen Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	Lord John Manners
Succeeded by	Acton Smee Ayrton
Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
In office 1877–1880
Monarch	Queen Victoria
Preceded by	Sir Henry Elliot
Succeeded by	The Earl of Dufferin
Personal details
Born	5 March 1817 (1817-03-05) Paris, France
Died	5 July 1894 (1894-07-06) (aged 77) London, England
Nationality	British
Political party	Liberal
Spouse	Mary Enid Evelyn Guest

Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB PC (/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.^[1][2]