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Lord Ronald Gower born 2 August 1845 (d. 1916)Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower was a British aristocrat, Liberal politician, sculptor and writer.
The youngest son of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland and the former Lady Harriet Howard, daughter of the 6th Earl of Carlisle, he was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was a Liberal Member of Parliament for Sutherland from 1867-1874. He was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and of the Birthplace and Shakespeare Memorial Building at Stratford-on-Avon.
A sculptor, he also published a number of works on the fine arts. His most important sculpture was the statue of Shakespeare and four of his principal characters, erected in Stratford-upon-Avon. He also created a sculpture depicting Marie Antoinette on her way to the scaffold and another of a member of the Old Guard at Waterloo.He also wrote biographies of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc, and a history of the Tower of London.
He never married, and was well known among the homosexual community of the time. Oscar Wilde's story The Portrait of Mr W.H. has been interpreted as a comment on Gower's social circle, and Gower is generally identified as the model for Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1879 hints of his homosexual liaisons published in the journal Man of the World led Gower to sue the paper, but later in the year the Prince of Wales sent him a letter accusing him of being 'a member of an association for unnatural practices', to which Gower wrote an angry reply. John Addington Symonds, who stayed with him once, stated that Gower 'saturates ones spirit in Urningthum [homosexuality] of the rankest most diabolical kind'.
Gower's most notable lover was the journalist Frank Hird, a relationship that lasted to the end of his life. Gower adopted Hird as his son, leading Wilde to remark on one occasion, 'Frank may be seen, but not Hird.'