Sir Thomas Ralph Merton KBE, DSc, FRS[1] (12 January 1888 – 10 October 1969) was an English physicist, inventor and art collector.
In view of his delicate health and his promise as a scientist, Oxford allowed Merton to go straight to a research thesis without taking his final exams; this was an unusual privilege.
In 1912 he married (Violet) Marjory, the charming and accomplished daughter of Lt.-Colonel W. H. Sawyer, and moved – with his laboratory in tow – to his London house, on Gilbert Street.
By an ingenious technique Merton measured the discontinuities in the lines due to their partial breaking up into components under the influence of the magnetic field between adjacent atoms.
The two men applied the same technique to the measurement of the spectra of hydrogen and helium, reproducing the distribution of intensity of some stellar lines in the laboratory for the first time.
In 1923 Merton left Oxford to live at Winforton House in Herefordshire, the estate he had acquired with 3 miles of salmon fishing on the Wye.
In place of this, Merton ruled a very fine helix continuously on a steel cylinder which he then opened out upon a plane gelatine-coated surface by his copying method.
[2] Merton handed these processes over to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) for further development and they formed the basis of a considerable research programme.
Merton was able to reply by return of post, and soon after was asked to join the air defence committee where he learned that his discovery had made possible the two-layer long-persistence radar screens which helped to bring victory in the Battle of Britain.
He formed a committee of experts to control its finances, and it was on his initiative that charitable bodies were given power to invest in equities, where they had previously been limited to gilt-edged stock.
[3] In 1930 John, the eldest of the Mertons' five sons, brought home the drawing prize from Eton and this proved a turning point in both his and his father's lives.
In making his collection Sir Thomas followed his own interests and every work in it represents the personal taste of its owner, be the subject sacred or secular.
No picture has been admitted merely because of size or with the intention of filling a certain space, but each has been selected for its pigmentary quality and with the determination to exclude anything that falls short of a high standard of perfection.
Preference is given to portraits which in expression, deportment and costume, convey a very clear idea of the life, taste and colour of their period... Next come the group of devotional pictures on a small scale, intended originally for the privacy of the home rather than public worship... A few pictures fascinate by their narrative as the predella by Fungai or the three Cassoni as do the drawings by being preparatory studies for the more elaborate works.
The clou of his Italian pictures was the Botticelli Portrait of a Young Man holding a Medallion, now on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which had been in the Newborough collection:[5] this cost £17,000 in 1941.
The Behams catalogued below, which Scharf's erroneously ascribed to Mielich, were appropriately complemented by portraits by two of the artist's German contemporaries, Cranach and Hans Krell.
Sir Thomas knew how important a contribution frames could make to the impact of his pictures, and in this respect was well served by Pollak, the framer who was admired by other major collectors of his generation.
In fact it applies to everything we try to understand and measure, from the precision with which the deflection of a galvanometer can be read to the amount we can grasp of a conversation at a cocktail party, where the signal is what someone is saying to us and the noise is the integrated chatter of the other guests.
Leonardo da Vinci in his notes says that 'if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to different landscapes adorned with mountains etc., etc., and an infinite number of things which you can reduce into separate and well-conceived forms.'"