Flamboyant aristocrat covered walls of his stately home with his erotic paintings

The 7th Marquess of Bath, who has died of Covid-19 aged 87, was the proprietor of Longleat, his family’s magnificent Tudor home in Wiltshire, and the most flamboyant and eccentric member of Britain’s aristocracy.

A large, long-haired and straggle-bearded bohemian, Lord Bath pursued a colourful career as an artist, novelist and sexual libertine; he painted garish erotic murals on the walls of Longleat’s west wing, and stood as parliamentary candidate for the Wessex Regionalist Party, which believed in a world government based on the Sinai peninsula.

His father, the 6th marquess, opened Longleat to the public on a commercial basis after World War II in an attempt to pay off death duties.

Known as the ‘‘father of the stately home industry’’, he did so with panache, populating the park with lion ‘‘extras’’ bought from the film Born Free, then adding further exotic animals, a funfair, pleasure boats, a putting green and tea rooms.

The 7th marquess adopted his unorthodox lifestyle in reaction against the equally unorthodox views of his father who, unusually for a decorated British war hero, had been a fervent admirer of Hitler. The Nazi leader was, he claimed, ‘‘a helluva fella’’, and he showed his admiration by amassing a formidable collection of Hitleriana, before switching his interest to Margaret Thatcher.

Notwithstanding a difficult relationship with his father, the 7th Lord Bath inherited his commitment to Longleat – adding the Centre Parcs holiday village, a version of Stonehenge and no fewer than seven mazes, including the longest hedge labyrinth in the world.

He also fully exploited the commercial value of his own personality; many visitors to Longleat came not to see the lions, or the house, but to glimpse the man once dubbed ‘‘the Loins of Longleat’’.

Lord Bath was mainly known for his interest in pantheism and sex. He had studied painting in Paris, and from 1969 the covering of Longleat’s walls with his murals was one of his most publicised obsessions.

He was also a collector of women. Downstairs, visitors could marvel at ‘‘Bluebeard’s Gallery’’, a spiral staircase on whose walls he had mounted a series of threedimensional portraits in oil and sawdust of all the women he had known (in the biblical sense), with the date of first meeting to the left of each face and date of painting to the right. Throughout his life, he had three or four mistresses – or what he called ‘‘wifelets’’ – at any one time.

There was also an official wife, Anna Gael, a Hungarian model he met outside a Paris cinema when she was just 15. She lived in Paris and visited Longleat once a month.

Despite all these distractions, Lord Bath lived rather a lonely existence in a bachelor penthouse in the attics. The only permanent residents of Longleat, apart from himself, were a married couple who looked after him and his beloved labradors. It would have been nice to have found a soulmate, he admitted, ‘‘but I haven’t. And it’s too late now.’’

Alexander George Thynne was born the second son of Viscount Weymouth, eldest son of the 5th Marquess of Bath. An elder brother had died in infancy. He would change the spelling of his name to Thynn in 1976, believing it to be more authentic.

Alexander’s father, Henry, had been described by his headmaster at Harrow as ‘‘moronic beyond reach’’, yet got into Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh. His mother, Daphne, had been ‘‘removed’’ from two schools, once for spearing a geometry mistress in the backside with a compass. As might be expected, their children had an unconventional upbringing. ‘‘Frightfully noisy and drunken,’’ Waugh reported after a weekend at Longleat in 1948. ‘‘No sleep. Jazz all day.’’

At first, Alexander seemed destined to follow a well-trodden aristocratic path. At Eton, contemporaries recalled him as ‘‘tall, handsome, athletic . . . something of a school hero . . . totally straight up and down’’.

He went on to do national service, before studying at Oxford. But somewhere along the way he rejected his father’s ambitions for him and developed a philosophy of his own. He grew pigtails and, though in possession of a trust fund, pretended to be impoverished. While studying painting in Paris, he developed his distinctive style of floral waistcoats, velvet caps and bare feet.

For some years before inheriting his title, he had been working on a 25-volume autobiography. By 2005, four had been published. He also wrote three novels, and made a record of his own songs, I Play the Host.

His son Ceawlin, pronounced ‘‘See-aw-lin’’, after the 6th King of Wessex, succeeds him as the 8th Marquess of Bath. –

Throughout his life, he had three or four mistresses – or what he called ‘‘wifelets’’ – at any one time.