Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks (20 March 182621 May 1897) was a British antiquarian and museum administrator. Franks was described by Marjorie Caygill, historian of the British Museum, as "arguably the most important collector in the history of the British Museum, and one of the greatest collectors of his age."
Early life
Born at Geneva, he was elder son of Captain Frederick Franks, R.N., and of Frederica Anne, daughter of Sir John Saunders Sebright. His godfather was William Hyde Wollaston, a friend of his mother. His early years were spent mainly in Rome and Geneva. In September 1839 he went to Eton College, where he remained until 1843.
Franks then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. As undergraduate he began his collection of brass rubbings, ultimately given to the Society of Antiquaries; was one of the founders of the Cambridge Architectural Society and an early member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society; and was also one of the four student members of the Ray Club. On leaving Cambridge in 1849 Franks devoted his energies to the Royal Archæological Institute, then newly established, and laid the foundations of his knowledge of ancient and medieval art, in arranging its collections for annual congresses. In 1850 he was secretary of the first exhibition of medieval art held in the rooms of the Society of Arts.
At the British Museum
In 1851, Franks was appointed assistant in the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum. The post was newly founded, and the brief was to develop a collection of "British antiquities". Franks in a 45-year career at the Museum went on to launch five distinct departments. David M. Wilson writes that "In many respects Franks was the second founder of the British Museum".
Administrator
At the British Museum, and as director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an appointment he received in 1858, he made himself the leading authority in England on medieval antiquities of all descriptions, upon porcelain, glass, artefacts of anthropological interest, and works of art later than the Classical period.
In 1866, British and medieval antiquities, together with the ethnographic collections, were formed into a separate department under his superintendence, as Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography. The Christy collection of ethnography in Victoria Street, London, was also under his care before its incorporation into the British Museum collections.
He became vice-president and ultimately president of the Society of Antiquaries; and in 1878 he declined the principal librarianship (then the title of the executive head of the British Museum).
Franks was a member (No152) of the Roxburghe Club 1894-1897 and elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1895.
Franks retired on his seventieth birthday in 1896. In 1892 he 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 temporarily had to fund the purchase with £5,000 of his own money.
Towards the end of his career, he wrote: