Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB PC (/lɛərd/; 5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was an English Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat.

During this period he built up a significant collection of paintings, which due to a legal loophole he had as a diplomat, he was able to extricate from Venice and bequeath to the National Gallery (as the Layard Bequest) and other British museums.

On 9 March 1869, at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, Westminster, London, he married his first cousin once removed, Mary Enid Evelyn Guest.

After spending nearly six years in the office of his uncle, Benjamin Austen, he was tempted to leave England for Sri Lanka (Ceylon) by the prospect of obtaining an appointment in the Civil Service, and he started in 1839 with the intention of making an overland journey across Asia.

[3] After wandering for many months, chiefly in Persia, with Bakhtiari people and having abandoned his intention of proceeding to Ceylon, he returned in 1842 to the Ottoman capital Constantinople where he made the acquaintance of Sir Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador, who employed him in various unofficial diplomatic missions in European Turkey.

from the University of Oxford and the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, Layard returned to Constantinople as attaché to the British embassy, and, in August 1849, started on a second expedition, in the course of which he extended his investigations to the ruins of Babylon and the mounds of southern Mesopotamia.

During these expeditions, often in circumstances of great difficulty, Layard despatched to England the splendid specimens which now form the greater part of the collection of Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum.

Elected as a Liberal member for Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1852, he was for a few weeks Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, but afterwards freely criticised the government, especially in connection with army administration.

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.

[11] 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.