(b Knutsford, Ches, April 4, 1762; d Knutsford, June 18, 1827). English politician, patron and collector. He was the most important collector of contemporary British art in the first quarter of the 19th century. He succeeded to the baronetcy in 1770, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and travelled in France and Italy in 1785–6. Thereafter he settled comfortably into politics and was three times a Member of Parliament. A competent amateur artist, he was taught by Paul Sandby, among others, and made a small series of lithographs from his own drawings of fish, birds and landscapes. Leicester’s patronage of contemporary artists may have begun with the commission of at least nine portraits of his mistress, Emily St Clare, from various artists between 1801 and his marriage in 1810 to Georgiana Maria Cotten. The only extant portrait from this group is John Hoppner’s full-length of Miss St Clare as a Bacchante (1806; Kansas City, MO, Nelson–Atkins Mus. A.). By 1806...