page_title: Austen Henry Layard
section_title: Retirement in Venice
hierarchical_section_title: Austen Henry Layard / Biography / Retirement in Venice
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Austen Henry Layard (1817 - 1894), voyageur, archéologue, cunéiformiste, historien de l'art, dessinateur, collectionneur, écrivain et diplomate anglais, connu pour avoir fait les premières excavations de Kalkhu.English: Austen Henry Layard (1817 - 1894), English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat, best known as the excavator of Nimrud.
context_page_description: Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB PC was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. 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.
context_section_description: Layard retired to Venice. There he took up residence in the sixteenth-century palazzo on the grand canal named Ca Cappello, just behind Campo San Polo, and which he had commissioned historian Rawdon Brown, another long-time British resident of Venice, to purchase for him in 1874.
  In Venice he devoted much of his time to collecting pictures of the Venetian school, and to writing on Italian art.
  On this subject he was a disciple of his friend Giovanni Morelli, whose views he embodied in his revision of Franz Kugler's Handbook of Painting, Italian Schools (1887). He wrote also an introduction to Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes's translation of Morelli's Italian Painters (1892–1893), and edited that part of Murray's Handbook of Rome (1894) which deals with pictures. In 1887 he published, from notes taken at the time, a record of his first journey to the East, entitled Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing thought it 'one of the most interesting books' vowing to 'read it again some day'. An abbreviation of this work, which as a book of travel is even more delightful than its predecessors, was published in 1894, shortly after the author's death, with a brief introductory notice by Lord Aberdare. Layard also from time to time contributed papers to various learned societies, including the Huguenot Society, of which he was first president.
  He died on 5 July 1894 at his residence 1 Queen Anne Street, Marylebone, London.  After a post mortem autopsy his remains were cremated at the Woking Crematorium in Surrey.  His ashes were interred in the cemetery of Canford Magna Parish Church in Dorset, England.
caption: Austen Henry Layard (1883)
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