Augustus Wollaston Franks
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Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks KCB (20 March 1826 – 21 May 1897), was an English antiquary. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He early showed inclination for antiquarian pursuits, and in 1851 was appointed assistant in the Antiquities Department of the British Museum. In 1855 he was responsible for acquiring for the British Museum the finest items from the collection of Ralph Bernal Osborne, the Liberal politician and collector, including the outstanding Lothair Crystal. Here, and as director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an appointment he received in 1858, he made himself the first authority in England upon medieval antiquities of all descriptions, upon porcelain, glass, the manufactures of savage nations and in general upon all Oriental curiosities and works of art later than the Classical period.
In 1866, the British and medieval antiquities, with the ethnographic collections, were formed into a distinct department under his superintendence, as Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography; and the Christy collection of ethnography in Victoria Street, London, prior to in amalgamation with the British Museum collections, was also under his care. He became vice-president and ultimately president of the Society of Antiquaries, and in 1878 declined the principal librarianship (then the title of the executive head of the museum) of the museum. In 1892 he finally succeeded in raising the £8,000 needed to buy the Royal Gold Cup; "to Franks this was his greatest acquisition, and the one of which he was most proud". He had previously had to fund the purchase with £5,000 of his own money temporarily. He retired on his seventieth birthday, 1896.
His ample fortune was largely devoted to the collection of ceramics and precious objects of medieval art (although also including many items from the Oxus Treasure) most of which became the property of the nation, either by donation in his lifetime or by bequest at his death; the Franks Casket is probably the best known. Although chiefly a medieval antiquary, Franks was also an authority on classical art, especially Roman remains in Britain: he was also greatly interested in bookplates and playing-cards, of both of which he formed important collections. He edited Kemble's Horae Ferales and wrote numerous memoirs on archaeological subjects Perhaps his most important work of this class is the catalogue of his own collection of porcelain.
Franks' great grandmother, Sarah Knight, was a cousin of Richard Payne Knight, another wealthy bachelor benefactor of the British Museum. Augustus blamed his obsessive collecting on his genes. "Collecting is a hereditary disease, and I fear incurable."
Franks died 21 May 1897, and is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
