Cecil French was a Dublin-born artist who trained at the Royal Academy Schools and subsequently settled in Fulham. When he died in 1953, he left a collection of 53 Pre-Raphaelite and Post-Romantic pictures to what was then the Metropolitan Borough of Fulham and is now the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. The collection features stunning examples of work from artists such as John William Waterhouse, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, William Shackleton and George Fredric Watts. The paintings are now housed in Leighton House, the Holland Park home of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Frederick, Lord Leighton.