Charles Towne is the leading Liverpool landscape, animal and sporting painter of the first half of the nineteenth century. In his early work, his drawing is charmingly naive and provincial, and shows an awareness of the contemporary work of Thomas Stringer and, ultimately, George Stubbs, both of whom were from the same geographical area. By the late 1790's he had developed more sophisticated draughtsmanly skills which are his subsequent hallmark throughout a long career. He was born in Wigan in 1763, but passed most of his working life in Liverpool; his frequent employment in rural Lancashire and Cheshire arose from a wide patronage among the local gentry. He visited London in the late 1790's, where he was noted in Farrington's "Diaries", and it seems likely that it was here that his techniques developed their more sophisticated aspects. His first painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799. In the next decade he appears to have been itinerant (his name is missing from the Liverpool Directories for these years), but by the end of the decade, he was sufficiently well-known in that City to be a founder, and the Vice-President of Liverpool Academy. He died in Liverpool on 6th January 1840, the possessor of a considerable local and national reputation