The Trust was set up in 1995 to carry out the charitable directives of its late founding benefactor George Lester Winward (1934-1997), who transferred the ownership of his picture collection to the Trust in order to make it permanently available for study by art scholars and researchers, and as a resource for art appreciation.
The collection comprises a variety of paintings, drawings, etchings and prints. Works range from the sixteenth-century Italian School, Dutch and Flemish pictures from the seventeenth century and works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English School. They are mostly small in size and in some cases miniature.
