The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

The 2nd Lord Northwick was an exceptional collector and assembled what became one of the largest groups of early Italian pictures in England. In 1859 part of the collection was bought in for his successor and returned to Northwick, from where it was dispersed in a series of sales at Christie's in 1966. Sir Thomas Phillips, 1st Bt. (1792-1872), whose estate of Middle Hill, near Broadway, not far from Cheltenham, was the outstanding manuscript collector of his generation and acquired a number of pictures at the Northwick sale.