John Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland

John Sutherland Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland (10 May 1915 – 21 September 2000) was a British peer from the Egerton family. He was styled Viscount Brackley until 1944 when he became the 5th Earl of Ellesmere /ɛlzmɪər/ on inheriting his father's substantive title and inherited his ducal title in 1963 from a distant cousin.

The son of John Egerton, 4th Earl of Ellesmere and Lady Violet Lambton, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force and was captured at St Valery in 1940. He spent four years in a prisoner of war camp. Upon his return in 1944, he succeeded his father as Earl of Ellesmere.

In 1963, George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland, his distant cousin 'Geordie', died, leaving no immediate male heir. Egerton succeeded to the dukedom, but did not inherit the Sutherland estates or Dunrobin Castle, which went to Elizabeth Janson, Geordie's niece, who became the Countess of Sutherland.

Estate duty forced the Duke to sell many pieces from the family's renowned collection of paintings and drawings. The family's wealth had shifted from landholdings to an estimated £120m collection of paintings which included Raphaels, Titians, Tintorettos, Poussins, and a large part of the famous Orléans collection from the Palais Royal in Paris. The wealth had come from the acquisitions of the first Duke of Bridgewater, who built the famous canal and passed on his mining riches, and from intermarriage. Benjamin Disraeli once paid tribute to the family's "talent for absorbing heiresses".

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