Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867) was a coachmaker who lived in Tottenham, London. From 1820, he assembled an important collection of Turner watercolours, numbering more than fifty by 1834: this was memorialised in a watercolour depiction of his library, commissioned from John Scarlett Davis in 1835 (British Museum). He also collected drawings by David Wilkie and was later a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Windus is known to have made his collection readily accessible to visitors. In his diaries, Ruskin records visits to Windus's house to see and study the Turners, in February, May, November and December 1843: on 5 December, 'spent a pleasant evening, wandering from Turner to Turner' ( Evans and Whitehouse, Diaries I, pp.244, 246, 252, 254).