Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was born in Alameda, California, and graduated from Yale College in 1918. After his war service, he spent two years at the Yale University Press. In 1924 Mr. Lewis bought six letters from Horace Walpole to John Pinkerton, the Scottish historian. Until then, as he recalled later, "the eighteenth century had meant to me . . . a fancy-dress affair with everyone giggling in wigs and tights. . . . Walpole's letters changed all that. Thanks to him and Lady Louisa Stuart, the men and women in Reynolds' and Gainsborough's pictures stepped out of their frames and became real people." In 1926 he acquired his home in Farmington where he began to focus on his lifetime pursuit of collecting and editing Walpole's works.

When Mr. Lewis's bust was installed in the Long Hall at Farmington in 1978, it joined that of the eighteenth-century Italian physician, Dr. Antonio Cocchi. In comparing the two busts, Mr. Lewis would first credit Dr. Cocchi for having saved Horace Walpole's life on the Grand Tour, then he would explain his own role in having rescued Walpole's reputation from obscurity two centuries later.