Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava - Patron of 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 Thomas "Loel" Guinness and his second wife, Lady Isabel Manners, herself a daughter of John Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland. Their wedding was at 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 1960s. You would find yourself talking to Princess Margaret or Duncan Grant and Angelica Garnett, or Francis Bacon or Stephen Spender or the Queen Mother."