The aptness of the tavern-setting in some of his best acquisitions, notably those by Teniers and Adriaen van Ostade, cannot have been lost on McEwan, his daughter, or their guests.
In certain respects, Mrs Greville’s acquisitions built upon the strengths of her father’s collection. Once she had come into her inheritance, she bought two further Raeburns (one of them the most expensive picture she ever acquired) and complemented them with the ensemble of British portraits, which now hangs in the dining-room.
This taste for portraiture also informed the significant Dutch pictures she added to her father’s collection, along with some important landscapes of the same school. Although her eye for Dutch art is sometimes held in lower regard than McEwan’s, the acquisition of Frans van Mieris’s virtuoso self-portrait is attributed to her.
Like her father, Mrs Greville relied on art dealers for guidance. However, she also drew on the expertise of Tancred Borenius of University College London, reflecting the increasing reliance of top-end collectors on the advice of academic art historians. His influence is strongly felt in the important series of Italian medieval and renaissance religious works, which were acquired throughout the 1930s and now hang in the South corridor. Another new element Mrs Greville introduced to the collection were 16th-century Flemish, German and French portraits.
