Merton's instinctive connoisseurship is indicated by the distinction of so many of his acquisitions. The clou of his Italian pictures was the Botticelli "Portrait of a Young Man holding a Medallion", now on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which had been in the Newborough collection: this cost £17,000 in 1941. He owned cassone panels formerly in the collections of Otto H. Kahn and Lord Crawford, as well as Fungai's predella panel of the Martyrdom of Saint Clement, now reunited with an erstwhile companion in the City Art Gallery, York. The Madonna and Child with a Donor by Bartolommeo Montagna, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, is one of the most beautiful of that Vicentine master's creations and was the finest picture from the collection of Dr. Alfred Mond to be withheld from his bequest to the National Gallery. Signorelli's exceptional chalk study of a young warrior was sold by private treaty through Christie's, also to the Walker Art Gallery, in 1980. Of the northern pictures seven were portraits, the earliest being the Portrait of a Man formerly believed to be Guillaume Fillastre, long on loan to the National Gallery, now thought to be by a close follower of Rogier van der Weyden: purchased for £18,500 in 1940, this was sold in lieu of taxation through Christie's in 1987 and is now in the Courtauld Institute. The Behams catalogued below, which Scharf's erroneously ascribed to Mielich, were appropriately complemented by portraits by two of the artist's German contemporaries, Cranach and Hans Krell. Sir Thomas knew how important a contribution frames could make to the impact of his pictures, and in this respect was well served by Pollak, the framer who was admired by other major collectors of his generation.