The paintings at Penrhyn were almost entirely bought by Colonel Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai (1800–1886), notably Dieric Bouts’s ‘St Luke drawing the Virgin’. At the advice of Belgian dealer C. J. Nieuwenhuys (1799–1833), he acquired seventeenth-century Dutch paintings including Rembrandt’s ‘Catrina Hooghsaet’, Venetian sixteenth-century religious paintings, like the ‘Sacra Conversazione with Saint Jerome, Saint Justina, Saint Ursula and Saint Bernardino of Siena’, now attributed to Bonifazio de' Pitati (Verona 1487–Venice 1553) and Spanish seventeenth-century works, including a ‘Two Figures at a Table with Kitchen Utensils’, recently revealed to be by Antonio Pereda y Salgado. In the nineteenth century the family wealth came from the Welsh estates, mainly the slate quarries, the major one of which is depicted in Henry Hawkins’s ‘The Penrhyn Slate Quarry’. In 1899 the 2nd Lord Penrhyn had the pictures cleaned and rehung by Sir Walter Armstrong, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland and they were catalogued by his daughter, Alice Douglas-Pennant. It is a rare example in Britain of a nineteenth-century collection that has survived virtually intact, in situ, and in family ownership.