Description

Meet Sir Rowland Winn, 5^th Baronet of Nostell, legendary for his extravagance in pursuing his taste for the ‘classical antique’. In this portrait he displays his wife Sabine Louise d’Hervert as one of his valuable possessions, likened by the integrated classical bust and picture-within-the-picture to a Grecian goddess. They stand in the fabulous library Winn had commissioned at the family seat, Nostell Priory in Yorkshire; its shelves, holding tomes including Greek and Latin classics, are adorned with busts of ancient poets and sages.

When Rowland succeeded his father in 1765, he began to turn Nostell into a sumptuous Palladian stately home, hiring Robert Adam as architect and interior designer, Antonio Zucchi, Angelica Kauffman and Hugh Douglas Hamilton for the lavish figurative painting on classical themes, and Thomas Chippendale to make the furniture. The façade featured the elaborate style columns which Adam had recently made famous Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (London, 1764): only the palace fit for a Roman Emperor was good enough for the 5^th Baronet. (The columns were later replaced by Corinthian ones).

The Winn family had originally been textile merchants, but had acquired their Baronetcy as a reward for Royalism on the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. They made huge amounts of money not only from textiles but corn and the mining of coal, a well developed industry around Wakefield by the mid-18^th century.

Yet the 5^th Baronet’s extravagant tastes brought his dynasty to the brink of bankruptcy by his death in 1785. Its fortunes were not restored until the estates were unexpectedly inherited by his grandson Charles in 1817—one of the children born to Sir Rowland’s daughter Esther and the Nostell Priory baker, John Williamson. She had caused a scandal by her cross-class elopement and defection with Williamson to Manchester.