East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust was formed on 1st April 2003, following the merger of Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Health Care NHS Trust and Burnley Health Care NHS Trust. The Trust owns a small collection of paintings which hang on the walls of Blackburn, Burnley and Pendle hospitals. Many of them, such as the three triptychs 'Flying Geese', 'Swans' and 'Seagulls' by D. A. Wilkinson, on the stairwells in Blackburn, are brightly coloured and fun and make the hospital environment less forbidding. There are also more complex paintings such as 'The Phoenix', which hangs outside the Trust headquarters in Blackburn, 'Montage with Faces' in the urology corridor at the Royal Blackburn Hospital, and 'Tool Cupboard' by Margaret Jackson, on the wall of one of the main corridors at the Royal Blackburn Hospital and commissioned by Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Health Care NHS Trust. There is just one painting in Burnley General Hospital, a portrait by Tom Comley Vivian of Caleb Thornber. Thornber was a cotton-spinning manufacturer, Mayor of Burnley and a local benefactor. As well as being a supporter of the hospital in its early days he had bequeathed money for the erection of a War Memorial in Towneley Park and he gave a substantial bequest to Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museums which enabled it to buy 'The Picture Gallery' by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1925.