Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava

Sheridan Frederick Terence Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (9 July 1938 – 29 May 1988) was a British patron of the arts. Less formally he was usually called Sheridan Dufferin.

Born into an Anglo-Irish family from Ulster, he was the youngest child and only son of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and his wife, Maureen Guinness (daughter of The Honourable Arthur Ernest Guinness, second son of the 1st Earl of Iveagh). One of his sisters was the novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood.

Named after his playwright ancestor Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Dufferin was known by his father's courtesy title Earl of Ava until he succeeded his father in the marquessate in 1945, when he was only 6 years old. When he was aged 12, trustees acting in his name sold Clandeboye, his ancestral seat, to his estates company for £120,000 in order "to maintain his station in life", as the trustees allegedly said at the time.

After attending the day school Garth House in Bangor, County Down, he went to Eton College. After Eton he attended Christ Church, Oxford. A keen shot and sportsman, he played championship tennis at the Queen's Club, but it was at Oxford that he developed a passion for the arts.

After Oxford he met and went into partnership with John Kasmin, and opened the Kasmin Gallery on New Bond Street, London in 1963. The Kasmin was a radical gallery for the time and showed British and American abstract and pop art. The gallery was described as "a beautiful space in New Bond Street designed for them by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, with a curiously shaped white ceiling, white walls and a green-khaki rubberised floor. It was a space described by Kasmin as 'a machine for looking at pictures in'; those pictures, moreover, were prototypes of the new art. They looked as if they had been painted to be seen in museums: the space was designed for canvasses six feet square and upwards that would readily carry across a large room. The gallery thereby affirmed that painting had changed fundamentally: it was no longer being made to fit into drawing-rooms." Among the artists the gallery showed were Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Anthony Caro and most famously of all David Hockney. The Kasmin Gallery closed in 1972, with Kasmin going on to work in partnership with other London dealers up to the 1990s.

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