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It is hard not to warm to the personality of Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke (1656–1733), the most celebrated and eccentric collector of antiquities in early 18th-century Britain. In Lord Wharncliffe’s description a century later, the earl ‘distinguished himself chiefly by odd whims and peculiarities; one of which was a fixed resolution not to believe that any thing he disliked, ever did or could happen’. At the same time, he was a serious figure at a time of extraordinary transition in the scholarship of classical antiquities, when erudite antiquarians were seeking to make sense of classical art on the basis of a sometimes formidable knowledge of ancient literature and coinage, but with little access to comparative material and no established methodology. The signal achievement of Pembroke’s intellectual life was the formation of a huge collection of ancient and modern sculptures at the family seat of Wilton House in Wiltshire – the subject of my recently published catalogue and history, produced around 300 years after the formation of the collection.