Artists associated with the North East are featured throughout this compilation. Another way in which the North East has influenced art, however, has been through patronage. The nineteenth century North East industrialists supported the advanced, indeed controversial, artists of the day - the Pre-Raphaelite painters, thus advancing their own credentials as men of taste and culture. Isaac Lowthian Bell commissioned four pictures of his mines and furnaces, while Lord Armstrong had Thomas Napier Hemy paint a watercolour of his Elswick works. William Watson Pattinson of Felling Low Hall, Gateshead, commissioned Arthur Hughes to paint a group portrait of Pattinson's wife and children in 1867. The idyllic A Birthday Picnic set in Felling Wood, was the result.

James Leathart, like other Tyneside manufacturers was a considerable patron of the Pre-Raphaelites; Holman Hunt's great picture The Hireling Shepherd, now in Manchester, was once part of his collection. Leathart also commissioned Dante Gabriel Rossetti to paint his wife Maria's portrait in 1862. The studio at 14 St Thomas Crescent in Newcastle, where Rossetti painted the picture in December 1862, still stands at the rear of the house. Leathart's own portrait, commissioned from Ford Madox Brown in 1863-64 has the Leathart lead works in the background. The two portraits hung on either side of the fireplace in the drawing-room at their villa, Bracken Dene, in Low Fell, Gateshead. Brown was also in Newcastle to paint a smaller version of his celebrated picture Work. He used Maria's face for the second woman on the left - in the original painting, Brown's wife was the model.

Chemical manufacturers like Jacob Burnett and Alexander Stevenson were important patrons of Millais and Simeon Solomon, while James Hall, one of the coterie of industrialist-collectors based in Tynemouth, bought Holman Hunt's wonderful Isabella and the Pot of Basil in 1870. This painting can be seen in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, along with Burne-Jones' sumptuous Laus Veneris.

William Bell Scott (q.v.), a Pre-Raphaelite working in Newcastle, painted his celebrated Iron and Coal for the central hall in Wallington, while Alfred William Hunt was an artist much favoured by the great engineer Robert Sterling Newall (q.v.) in Gateshead. Newall clearly appreciated the 'sublime beauty' which the artist perceived in the industrial transformation of the landscape e.g. his sepia-wash of a Middlesbrough ironworks (1865) and the fine Travelling Cranes, Tynemouth of 1867.