Sheridan Frederick Terence Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th
Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (
July 9
1938 -
May 29 1988) was a British patron of the arts.
Childhood and Inheritance
He was the youngest child and only son of the
4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and his wife, Maureen
Guinness. One of his sisters was the novelist
Caroline Blackwood.
Named after his playwright ancestor
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord
Dufferin was known by his father's courtesy title
Earl of
Ava until he succeeded his father in the
marquessate in 1945, when he was only 6
years-old.
When he was aged 12, trustees acting in his
name sold Clandeboye
, his ancestral seat, to his estates company for
£120,000 in order "to maintain his station in life," as the
trustees allegedly said at the time.
After
attending a day school, Garth House, in Bangor, County
Down
he went to Eton College
. After Eton he attended Christ Church,
Oxford
. A keen shot and sportsman, he played
championship tennis at Queen's Club
, but it was at Oxford that he developed a passion
for the arts.
Patron of the arts
After
Oxford he met and went into partnership with John Kasmin, and opened the Kasmin Gallery on
New Bond Street, London
in
1963. The Kasmin was a radical gallery for the time and
showed British and American
abstract
and
pop art. The gallery was described as "a
beautiful space in New Bond Street designed for them by Ahrends,
Burton and Koralek, with a curiously shaped white ceiling, white
walls and a green-khaki rubberised floor. It was a space described
by Kasmin as 'a machine for looking at pictures in'; those
pictures, moreover, were prototypes of the new art. They looked as
if they had been painted to be seen in museums: the space was
designed for canvasses six feet square and upwards that would
readily carry across a large room. The gallery thereby affirmed
that painting had changed fundamentally: it was no longer being
made to fit into drawing-rooms." Among the artists the gallery
showed were
Frank Stella,
Kenneth Noland,
Anthony Caro and most famously of all
David Hockney. The Kasmin Gallery closed in
1972, with Kasmin going on to work in partnership with other London
dealers up to the 1990s.
Lord
Dufferin was appointed a trustee of the Wallace
Collection
in 1973, and was also a trustee of the National
Gallery, London
and continued to support up-and-coming contemporary
British artists. He also helped in the making of films about
the pianist
Liberace and the
Playboy entrepreneur
Hugh Hefner, as well as backing the
controversial 1976 film
Sebastiane,
directed by the British filmmaker
Derek
Jarman. He was also a sometime director of the
Guinness company, being a great-grandson of
Edward Guinness, 1st
Earl of Iveagh.
In 1964 Lord Dufferin married his cousin Serena Belinda (Lindy)
Rosemary Guinness, daughter of Group Captain
Loel Guinness and his second wife, Lady Isabel
Manners, herself a daughter of
John Manners, 9th Duke of
Rutland.
Their wedding was at St. Margaret's,
Westminster
where 1,800 guests attended, including Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon. Lady Dufferin was
also passionate about art and together they were at centre of the
trendy art scene in late 1960s London. Parties at their house in
Holland Park "were legendary in the late 60s. You would find
yourself talking to Princess Margaret or
Duncan Grant and
Angelica Garnett, or
Francis Bacon or
Stephen Spender or the
Queen Mother."
Legacy
Lord Dufferin died on
May 29,
1988 from an AIDS-related illness, aged 49. As there
were no other living descendants in the direct male line from the
1st Marquess, the
marquessate and the
other peerages created for the 1st Marquess in the
Peerage of the United Kingdom
became extinct. The Barony of Dufferin and Clandeboye, the family's
older title in the
Peerage of
Ireland, passed to a distant kinsman.
In the years immediately before, and especially after, her
husband's death, Lady Dufferin developed new initiatives at
Clandeboye, and today the estate has associations with a number of
environmental organisations and projects, being a home for
Conservation Volunteers
Northern Ireland's biodiversity projects, training centre and
tree nursery (in the old walled garden).
The Northern Ireland
branch of the Woodland Trust was
established in 1998 in partnership with the Dufferin Foundation,
and Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew
have developed a blossoming relationship with
Clandeboye since 2003. Lady Dufferin also returned to the
art world, and has exhibited in galleries in London and New York
under the name Lindy Guinness. She was also the inspiration behind
the opening of the Ava Gallery at Clandeboye in 2004, which
exhibits works by leading contemporary Northern Irish artists and
an annual exhibition of museum-standard work by a major artist or
group of artists.
References
- 'Someone you had to be a bit careful with' David Sylvester,
Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser by Harriet Vyner
[1]
- MARK LANCASTER INTERVIEW by Gary Comens (2004) [2]
External links
Wikis
Map
Search