William Eaton, 2nd Baron Cheylesmore

His mezzotints and other prints, over 10,000 in number, were left to the British Museum, and five oil paintings to the National Gallery, London.

He also stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for the Conservative Party at Macclesfield in 1868, 1874 and 1880, and held a nominal partnership in the family silk business.

His father founded the family silk business, H. W. Eaton & Son, was a Conservative Member of Parliament for Coventry, and became Baron Cheylesmore in 1877, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee.

He evidently enjoyed a bargain, and his careful catalogue of his collection notes many higher prices paid at auction for prints he had bought for little.

[4] This may be part of the reason why, though a will of 1896 bequeathed his mezzotint collection to the National Portrait Gallery, in 1900 a codicil had transferred the bequest to the British Museum, very likely after being wooed by Sidney Colvin, Keeper of Prints and Drawings, and Alfred Whitman, superintendent of the Print Room and a writer on mezzotints.

[5] and described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "the finest private mezzotint collection ever formed" Cheylesmore assisted John Chaloner Smith in compiling his catalogue British Mezzotinto Portraits ... with Biographical Notes (London, 1878–84, 4 pts.

He did not buy the star of the sale, The Monarch of the Glen (lot 42, £7,245) by Sir Edwin Landseer, one of the most popular paintings of the age.