Wallington was deeded in 1941 by Sir Charles Trevelyan (1870–1958), 3rd Bt, as a matter of socialist principle and was the second major house and estate to come to the National Trust. It had, since the seventeenth century, been home to the Trevelyans and the Blacketts, who were magnates of Newcastle. As we see it today, it is essentially the creation of Sir Walter Calverley Blackett (1707–1777), 2nd Bt. It was inherited by Sir John Trevelyan (1734–1828), 4th Bt, whose main seat was at Nettlecombe in Somerset. He passed it to his son John (1761–1846), 5th Bt, after his marriage to the great heiress Maria Wilson in 1791. It was not exclusively occupied until Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan (1797–1879), 6th Bt, inherited and, together with his wife Pauline Jermyn (1816–1866), a talented painter and a close friend and confidante of Ruskin, created the mid-Victorian embellishment of the central hall. Amongst other contemporaries, they commissioned William Bell Scott (1811–1890), director of the School of Design in Newcastle, to paint the striking Northumbrian history murals. In the 1840s they had bought a number of important Early Italian pictures, including the 'Madonna and Child Enthroned' by Piero della Francesca, now in the Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, but, like the Dutch paintings collected by the previous generation, they have been dispersed. What remains of particular note are family portraits by artists such as Arthur Devis, Thomas Hudson, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney.