The story
On the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde stands a red sandstone Gothic Revival house built for one of the richest men of Victorian Britain. John Crichton-Stuart, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, commissioned it from the Edinburgh architect Robert Rowand Anderson after the old family house burned in December 1877. At its heart is the Marble Hall, a colonnaded space lit through stained glass, and the house is often described as the first home in Scotland lit by electricity.
The paintings belong to an earlier generation. The Bute Collection was formed mostly in the second half of the 18th century by the 3rd Earl of Bute, briefly prime minister to George III, and by his son, and it reached Mount Stuart in stages during the 20th century. Its Dutch and Flemish pictures include an inn interior by Pieter de Hooch, the painter of quiet Delft courtyards, in which a soldier pays the landlady. In 2016 the library also yielded a Shakespeare First Folio, once owned by the 18th-century scholar Isaac Reed.
