The Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the aristocrat and property developer who died yesterday (9 August) aged 64, owned one of the most important private collections of Old Masters in the UK. The family collection includes works by artists such as Velázquez, Stubbs, Lorrain and Rembrandt.
The property portfolio of the sixth duke covers around 300 acres in Belgravia and Mayfair in central London, but the late landowner also inherited an extensive collection of major Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, which are thought to be housed at the family seat of Eaton Hall in Chester, near Liverpool.
A selection of paintings drawn from the Duke of Westminster’s holdings, known as the Grosvenor fine art collection, are regularly displayed at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester. The museum is not owned by the family but was named after the first Duke of Westminster who donated part of the site where it was built in the 1880s. Last year, a pair of portraits by Rembrandt’s workshop—A Man with a Hawk and A Lady with a Fan (both 1643)—and two paintings by David Teniers the Younger, were shown at the museum.
This year, two works by Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Lorrain, including the latter’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (around 1631), are on loan to the Grosvenor Museum (until 18 September).
The Grosvenor collection also includes Morning: a pastoral landscape, and Evening: a pastoral caprice with the Arch of Constantine (both 1651), by Claude Lorrain, and The Grosvenor Hunt (1762) by George Stubbs. The family collection was built up in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the first and second Earls Grosvenor—Richard Grosvenor (1731-1802) and his son Robert Grosvenor (1767-1845)—who collected both contemporary art and Old Masters. Later, the first Duke (1825-99) added key works to the collection by Lucas Cranach and John Everett Millais.
The sixth duke was one of Britain’s richest men with an estimated wealth of around £8.3bn according to Forbes; his only son, Earl Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor, is due to inherit his late father's entire estate.