The inventor-turned-industrial magnate who founded Unilever spent millions on art — and housed it in this gallery built to honour the love of his life

One of the wonderful things about Britain is the wealth of beautiful and remarkable historic places that are distributed across the country, sometimes in ostensibly unlikely settings. One such, on the southern shores of the River Mersey among the quiet suburbs of the Wirral, is Port Sunlight, an oasis of greenery and Arts-and-Crafts beauty featured in Country Life in May 2018. At its heart is a long formal axis with gardens framed by trees and at the north end is a low neo-Classical building of pale stone: the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Village and gallery are among the legacies of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), one of the greatest businessmen in British history and also one of the greatest collectors.

Lever was born into a middle-class family in Bolton, Lancashire, the son of a successful wholesale grocer. The values of Congregationalist Christianity, self-help, hard work, free trade and Gladstonian liberalism shaped his life and his astonishingly successful career. He left school at 15 to join the family business, became a partner at 21 and married a Bolton woman, Elizabeth Ellen Hulme, at 22.

In his thirties, Lever specialised in soap manufacture, concentrating on marketing and developing a brand, Sunlight Soap (1884). He studied his customers and modern American marketing methods with great care. Lever Brothers was duly formed (James Darcy Lever was a semi-invalid and a sleeping partner) and bought a factory in Warrington (1885). Production soared from 10 tons of soap a week to 450. In 1888, Lever bought a 56-acre site in the Wirral, of which 24 acres were allotted to a new factory and 32 to a planned village for the workforce; the village expanded to cover 140 acres. In the same year, he rented Thornton Manor at Thornton Hough, four miles away, buying it outright in 1891. The house was grandly extended in Jacobean style and numerous other residences followed, including Roynton Cottage at Rivington in the Lanca-shire moors (1900); the Hill at Hampstead, London (1904); and Lews Castle, Stornoway, when Lever bought the island of Lewis (1918).

Lever always pointed to a pair of Derby biscuit porcelain figures of a shepherd and shepherdess, bought in about 1877–80 for his home in Wigan, as the foundation of his collection. However, the demands of business came first until the 1890s, when he began to buy paintings, furniture and ceramics on a large scale. His first major purchases were genre pictures that could be used in advertising, such as The New Frock by William Powell Frith. It is evident, however, that Lever genuinely loved art and came to have great knowledge and firm opinions about it.

If his art acquisitions grew in the 1890s, they increased exponentially in the 1900s. Lever Brothers was growing spectacularly in these decades and, by 1914, Lever’s personal fortune was estimated at £3 million. The scope of his interests broadened to embrace sculpture, furniture, embroidery and ceramics, with his friendship with James Orrock, a watercolour painter and dealer who campaigned for the recognition of British art, a major influence. On three occasions, Lever bought Orrock’s whole collection, including about 450 oil paintings, 240 watercolours and more than 1,000 works by Orrock himself. Orrock’s judgement seems to have been patchy, however, and relatively few of these remain in the gallery.

By this time, Lever was thinking of his collecting as being for public benefit, as well as his own. In 1902, he presented a fine historic house, Hall i’ th’ Wood, to the town of Bolton, with historic furniture and objects. In the same year, he mounted an exhibition of paintings at Hulme Hall, a canteen for the factory girls at Port Sunlight. In 1911, he opened a museum in Rivington Hall, a Georgian house on his estate north of Bolton, and a permanent display at Hulme Hall. By this time, his thoughts were tending towards establishing a major public gallery. That same year, he was granted a baronetcy, becoming Sir William Lever.

Events in 1913 prompted a new initiative. In May, Lever bought several major Victorian paintings from the collection of Australian mining magnate George McCulloch. The pictures were too large for Hulme Hall, which was already full, so, on June 24, he instructed his architects, William and Segar Owen of Warrington, to prepare designs for a new art gallery and library at Port Sunlight. A month later, on July 24, his wife, Elizabeth, Lady Lever, died and a new foundation was established later that year to commemorate her. An active public figure in the Wirral, she was a notable traveller, circumnavigating the globe twice and visiting Europe, Africa, America and Australia. In 1913, she was elected one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1917, Lever was raised to the peerage as 1st Viscount Leverhulme. His title incorporated his wife’s family name, but Elizabeth herself never held it. Hence, the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Work began on the new building in 1914, but was delayed by the outbreak of war. The early stages of Port Sunlight in the 1890s had a picturesque quality with winding roads, but, in 1910, a revised masterplan had introduced a more formal quality with a grand central axis; it seemed natural to site the gallery at its north-west end. The gallery was completed in 1922 and opened on December 16 by Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice.

William and Segar Owen’s may have been an obscure Warrington firm, but the gallery is a masterpiece. Earlier public buildings at Port Sunlight were in picturesque styles, but Lord Leverhulme suggested that this new one should be Classical (Fig 3). He had travelled in America and his grand new art gallery has a sophisticated Beaux-Arts quality, similar to the great Classical public buildings that were rising in the US at this time. The building is free-standing and rectangular, 364ft long, and perfectly symmetrical. It is contructed of reinforced concrete and faced with finely detailed Portland stone.

There are entrances with recessed Ionic porticos on all four sides, although only that on the west side is now used. Otherwise, the smooth stone-faced façades are largely blank, for the galleries are one storey high and top-lit. They are raised up on a high basement, which houses the shop, restaurant, offices and stores. Curiously, the restaurant is dressed in neo-Tudor fashion with timber-frame walls. The main interiors upstairs were beautifully finished with features such as mosaic floors, bronze sliding doors and linings of polished limestone in the lobbies.

Over 35 years or so, Lord Leverhulme bought 20,000 works of art, probably more than any other individual in British history. His interests were broad, but with a strong focus on British art. Many of the museum’s objects were selected from his existing collections, but a lot were specifically bought for it. In several areas, including ancient sculpture, Chinese art and Wedgwood, the gallery’s collections were acquired or developed to broaden its scope as a public institution. There is a strong sense that Leverhulme was personally responsible for these decisions, rather than a curator or adviser.

The interior is arranged around a long, galleried H-shaped hall (Fig 1). This introduces the visitor to two of the gallery’s main strengths: Victorian and Edwardian paintings, which embody high technical standards and tell stories, and fine British furniture. Magnificent works by Millais, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Sargent and others line the walls. One end is filled by Frederic, Lord Leighton’s The Daphnephoria (1874–76) a spectacular vision of ancient Greece that was one of the McCulloch purchases. An adjacent ‘history gallery’ provides an excellent introduction.

Lord Leverhulme loved the decorative arts and he was a bold and innovative collector. The Lady Lever Gallery has one of the finest groups of Georgian furniture in existence, with works by cabinetmakers from Thomas Chippendale and William Vile to John Cobb and Ince & Mayhew. Two long galleries to either side of the entrance hall present a spectacular array of cabinets, commodes, tables and chairs. The galleries house a superbly preserved set of Mortlake tapestries, too, The Story of Hero and Leander (1660s).

At either end of the central hall, there are large transverse galleries, with mid- to late-Georgian paintings and furniture. British portraits are another of the gallery’s strengths, with fine examples by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and others. Beyond these rooms, behind the north and south porticos, are beautiful domed rotundas that house sculpture (Fig 2). The one to the north has European sculpture from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, centred on the unabashedly erotic Salammbo (1899), by French sculptor Maurice Ferrary (Fig 5). Lord Leverhulme loved the contemporary ‘New Sculpture’ and bought works by artists such as Edward Onslow Ford and William Goscombe John, who were also personal friends. The south rotunda houses ancient Greek and Roman works, many of which were acquired in 1917 at the sale of the collection originally formed by Thomas Hope.

Another innovative aspect of the gallery, again made at Lord Leverhulme’s behest, was the inclusion of several ‘period rooms’, which were early examples of this genre. Three are lined with historic panelling that provides a setting for furniture, paintings and a range of objets d’art, including the Stowe State Bed from the Buckinghamshire house, a Rococo marvel of 1756–57 (Fig 6). The Adam Room, a neo-Classical vision in blue and white, was designed by furniture historian Percy Macquoid and made by White Allom & Co (Fig 7). Finally, the Napoleon Room has fine Empire furniture and paintings that commemorate Lord Leverhulme’s admiration for the French emperor and the art of his court.

Lord Leverhulme’s love of Wedgwood china led him to purchase Lord Tweedmouth’s impressive collection in 1905 — and add to it. As a result, the Lady Lever Gallery has one of the finest collections in existence. One of the gallery’s running themes is an appreciation of craft skill of all kinds; standing in the Wedgwood rooms, it is striking to reflect that these neo-Classical works of art, as beautiful and refined as anything produced in Europe at the time, were all designed and made by working-class people in Staffordshire. Leverhulme also had a long-standing interest in Oriental ceramics, buying examples in bulk and at a very high level of quality. His collecting initially focused on the Kangxi period (1662–1722), but, after the decision to establish the Lady Lever Gallery, he broadened the scope of his purchases to include carved hardstones, cloisonné enamels, Ming dynasty ceramics and other objects.

The galleries were all designed to be top-lit and the long central hall remains so. Other rooms, however, have had their top-lighting blocked, with mixed results. A few galleries, notably those housing the Wedgwood and Chinese collections, as well as one room of 18th-century British art (Fig 4), have been modernised with new display cases. In general, however, the gallery has been managed with an admirably light touch by its curators: in some ways, it remains a period piece, with a strong and appealing character of its own.

Lord Leverhulme kept adding to the museum collection until his death, on May 7, 1925. Thousands of his employees and their families filed past his coffin as it lay in state in the gallery, below The Daphnephoria. After his death, much of the private collection was sold, in sales that lasted 46 days. His descendants lived at Thornton Manor until the death of the 3rd Viscount Leverhulme in 2000. In 2001, the remaining collections there were sold by Christie’s for almost £10 million, still the record for a British house sale. Happily, several works from the collection were acquired for the Lady Lever Art Gallery at the event.

Lord Leverhulme has several memorials. Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch manufacturer Margarine Unie in 1930 to form Unilever. The company now trades in more than 190 countries and is valued at £108 billion. The Leverhulme Trust, founded under its namesake’s will, is one of Britain’s foremost cultural foundations, supporting scholarship and education across a very wide field, representing his success in business and his vast philanthropy. Port Sunlight and the Lady Lever Art Gallery are more personal memorials, expressive of his Victorian idealism and love of art. The latter was merged with the Walker Art Gallery and another four museums to form National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, now National Museums Liverpool, in 1986, in recognition of the scale and quality of their holdings.

Port Sunlight may seem remote, but it is easily reachable from nearby Liverpool or Chester and it is an uplifting place to visit. Arriving at the village is like stepping into another world. At its heart is this serene Classical building with its extraordinary collections, so rich and varied that it feels like a national gallery for a small nation.

Find out more about Lady Lever Gallery at the Liverpool Museums website.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.