Inventories and Catalogues

An inventory lists the objects at a location. With additional knowledge about the objects, the list can be organised to create a catalogue. The first catalogues at Towneley were exhibition catalogues for visitors viewing the loan exhibitions. These included listings of the fledgling museum contents but the best source of information on the growth of the museum in the early years is the minutes of the Art Gallery and Museum sub-committee published by the Town Council.

It was not until 1914 that an attempt was made to record all the museum contents in a permanent register. The register, labelled md2 , survives along with other archived museum documents in the Library. The contents were listed room by room but included some items not part of the permanent collections nor were all rooms listed. The contents were inadequately described and only the Old Burnley Room contents were listed in detail.

The room inventory was not kept up to date after 1914, rather the book was re-used in 1931 to create a catalogue of objects organised by collection type - oil paintings, watercolours, engravings, furniture etc. but many objects were listed simply as foreign. Another version including a donors index md3 was created at the same time. This also recorded the sizes of all the oil and watercolour paintings. The book illustrations were written down in md3, rather than using the printed version used for md2, but the list stops half way through. This second book was actually designed for recording collections of engravings.

The most comprehensive catalogue was made in 1938 with two copies [md7a, md7b] as an index of exhibits from Animals to Wright collection together with a donors index. Later annotations in red ink indicate the use made of this catalogue when completing the accession register in the 1970s, when unique object numbers were added to some of the pages.

Although no room inventories appear to exist for the period after 1944, there are inventories for Towneley Hall from the 19th century that are on loan from the Strachey family. The most detailed is an inventory dated 1871, written for the settlement of the Towneley estate by Charles Towneley (1803-1876). This lists all the paintings, sculpture and furniture in Towneley Hall room by room, with room names such as Chintz Dressing Room.