Robert William Sievier, 'Bust Portrait of Wynn Ellis MP', before 1843

This was the second of two marble busts Wynn Ellis MP (1790–1875) commissioned from Robert Sievier. He had rejected the first but was clearly pleased with this one as he allowed it to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 opposite Sievier’s bust of Mrs Ellis (now untraced).

Ellis was the National Gallery’s greatest benefactor in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born in Oundle, Northamptonshire, the son of Thomas Ellis and his wife Elizabeth Ordway, he was to make a fortune in the silk trade. Having begun as a junior, by age 21 Ellis had established his own business, purchasing the properties around him in the City of London and moving from a retail to a wholesale business. In 1814 he married Mary Maria Smith, a Lincoln girl, but they had no children.

Ellis was Liberal MP for Leicester from 1831 to 1834. He argued for free trade and particularly the abolition of import duties. As an importer of finished silks, he had much to gain from the Act of 1860 which abolished import duties on silks and all other foreign goods. However, the English silk-weaving industry had to face unfettered competition which meant that wages fell and unemployment became rife among silk weavers in Britain.

Ellis began buying paintings in the mid-1820s and had a strong liking for Dutch art. He made over 200 loans to exhibitions but because he had made his money from trade he was sometimes treated by reviewers as an ignorant amateur.

After Ellis’s death it was reported that his collection numbered some 800 pictures. He bequeathed to the Trustees of the National Gallery the right to select as many paintings as they wanted from a list of 403 ‘ancient’ pictures. The Trustees eventually chose 94 works, mainly by Flemish, Dutch, German, Italian and French painters.

Jabob van Ruisdael’s A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church, Cuyp’s A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures (‘The Large Dort’) and Bouts’s Portrait of a Man were among the Netherlandish paintings selected. Among the French pictures was Claude’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos and among the Italian works was Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne.

The one condition attached to Wynn Ellis’s bequest was that his paintings should hang together in the same room in the National Gallery. For at least ten years after his death Gallery 41 was reserved for the display of the Wynn Ellis Gift.

The man known in his lifetime for the tough slogan ‘work and wages’ was revealed after his death to have felt much compassion for those in need. The many good causes to which Wynn Ellis left legacies in his will reveal the soft heart of this childless man. Over 40 different hospitals, orphanages, asylums and benevolent societies received large bequests.