Identity:

Cyril Flower, barrister and collector. He was the eldest son of Mary and Philip William Flower of Furzedown, Streatham, who had emigrated to Australia in the 1830s and established a successful merchant trading house in Sydney. He married Constance de Rothschild, eldest daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, in December 1877. He became 1st Baron Battersea in 1892.

Life:

Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Flower was called to the bar in 1870 after reading law with Sir John Day. He was a Liberal MP from 1880 to 1892 and Lord of the Treasury under Gladstone, who made him the first Baron Battersea in 1892. Flower was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, and owned work by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Sandys, Gilbert and Storey. His patronage of JW spanned several decades, buying oils (Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (YMSM 60), Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea (YMSM 105) and Note in Red and Violet: Nets (YMSM 269)) and pastels (Corte del Paradiso (M.784) and The Red Doorway (M.795)). His taste was for Aesthetic movement and Old Master painters. Flower was elected a member of the Burlington Fine Art Club on 12 February 1867. His wife's cousin, Blanche Fitzroy, founded the Grosvenor Gallery with her husband Sir Coutts Lindsay.

Bibliography:

Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, London; Macleod, Dianne Sachko, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 414-15.