Robert Finch

Robert Finch (1783-1830), a minor English antiquary, lived in Italy for many years and was a friend and patron to a number of British expatriate artists. He left his library, pictures, coins, and medals to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. After graduating from Balliol, Oxford, he was ordained as an Anglican minister in Maidstone. After 1814 he mostly lived abroad, settling in Rome, where he adopted the fictitious ‘Colonel’ title.  He met Mary Shelley in 1819, and befriended several other expatriate literary figures. He died at his home, the Palazzo del Re di Prussia, in Rome, on 16 September 1830, from malaria. He married the former Maria Thomson of Kensington in 1820.