Edward Lear (1812-88), who is most famous for his limericks and nonsense verse, was also a prolific landscape watercolourist, but he began his career as a zoological draughtsman of distinction. As a young man he spent much of the period from 1831 to 1837 living and working at Knowsley under the patronage of Lord Stanley, later the 13th Earl of Derby.

Ferdinando, Lord Strange, later 5th Earl of Derby (c.1559-94), was the patron of an acting company called Lord Strange’s Men of which Shakespear himself was one of the leading players in Elizabethan England during the late 1580s and early 1590s.