Charles Towne trained under the landscape painter John Rathbone in Leeds, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, before working as a coach and ornamental painter alongside his brother in his native Lancashire. Born in Wigan in 1763, the son of a Liverpool portrait painter, he moved between Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester in his early career, exhibiting his first landscape at Liverpool's newly founded Society for Promoting Painting and Design in 1787, where he also made copies of two works by George Stubbs, whose influence proved decisive in shaping Towne's subsequent direction as an animal painter.
By the 1790s Towne had established a considerable reputation for horses, dogs and cattle rendered with a precision that owed a clear debt to Stubbs, combined with landscape settings that drew on his admiration for seventeenth-century Dutch painting; the critic W.S. Sparrow later observed that his landscapes carried "a Dutch mannerism," with animals and figures placed within them "with diligent and affectionate care," though the Dictionary of National Biography judged the same work "wanting in spirit and originality" by comparison with Stubbs himself. Towne moved to London in 1799, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy over the following years and forming friendships with George Morland and Philip James de Loutherbourg, before returning permanently to Liverpool in around 1810 or 1811. There he became a founder member of the Liverpool Academy, serving as its vice-president in 1812 and 1813, and continued to exhibit locally for much of the remainder of his career. He died in Liverpool in 1840, and his work is now held across a substantial number of British public collections, from the Walker Art Gallery to the National Trust.
The painting by Towne held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of a bay hunter and three dogs in a parkland setting, exemplifies the confident, Stubbs-influenced treatment of horses and dogs for which he achieved considerable celebrity in his own lifetime across Lancashire and Cheshire, and connects directly within the gallery's collection to his early teacher, John Rathbone.