Henry Blundell was born in Britain in 1724 at Ince Blundell, Lancashire. A Roman Catholic, like his friend and fellow collector Charles Townley, he was thus barred from the British university system, and he was educated in France at the college of the English Jesuits at St Omer and the English College, Douai. In 1760 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Mostyn, bt, of Talacre, Flintshire. In 1761 he had his family estates settled on him by his father. He also received a large inheritance from the death of a member of his mother's family without a male heir, further increased by income from his mother's estates and by his wife's death in 1767 and his father's death in 1773. His high income from various sources enabled him to collect classical sculpture and old master paintings, to improve Ince Blundell Hall and to buy and commission artworks from current artists like Richard Wilson, Canova, Gavin Hamilton and Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1776 he went on a Grand Tour to Italy, visiting Milan, Venice, Ancona, Rome and Naples. There he made his first classical sculpture purchase through the antiquary, Thomas Jenkins, but on later visits to Rome he came to mistrust Jenkins and relied more on Father John Thorpe. He tended to collect wholesale rather than discriminatingly, as with his group from the Villa Borrioni, and also knowingly purchased modern copies by Giuseppi Angelini and Carlo Albacini and others and classical works imaginatively restored by dealers such as Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Giovanni Volpato. Making other trips to Rome in 1782–3, 1786, and 1790, his collecting patterns improved, in 1783 acquiring the high quality Minerva from Palazzo Lante, but the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars put a pause to his collecting and transferred his attention to creating new buildings at Ince Blundell for his collections. He also became the Liverpool Academy of Arts's first patron on its foundation in 1810, and was active in Liverpool public life. Many of his collected artworks can be seen around the galleries of Liverpool. He died at Ince Blundell in 1810.
