Wallace Collection

ART AND INTRIGUE

The Wallace Collection in London is a museum with a history even more rococo than its collection ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

Hertford House, an imposing red brick building on a leafy London square was one of several impressive properties inherited by the fourth Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870; he is also called Lord Hertford). In 1900, having been bought by the government, it became the Wallace Collection [1], a national museum. With its many treasures and its domestic setting, it has been a haven for connoisseurs and dreamers ever since.

The generously proportioned rooms envelop one of the great surviving privately formed collections of 18th-century French art, furniture and gold boxes. This ensemble of opulent objects and lyrical pictures is displayed in rooms "papered" with intensely coloured silks. Crimson, emerald, coral and sapphire walls sing in harmony with the glazes of the Sèvres porcelain for which the collection is justly famous. (Even some of the dainty fruitwood, ormolu-mounted furniture is inset with Sèvres plaques.)

Among many exceptional pieces of French furniture, two by the celebrated Jean-Henri Riesener [2], cabinetmaker to the king, stand out: one is an engagingly inlaid marquetry desk, among the first with a rolltop; the other is an elaborate secretaire delivered to Marie Antoinette (the Wallace has the world's largest collection of her belongings). There are also gold boxes, elaborate gilded bronze mounted clocks, paintings by Boucher [3](including his portrait of Madame de Pompadour, pictured right), Watteau and Fragonard. The latter's famous "Swing" appears simultaneously light-hearted, lascivious and cruel. But at the Wallace, the world does not begin and end in France. There is also armour, majolica, medieval and Renaissance objets d'art and scores of Old Master paintings including outstanding works by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Hals and Titian.

At the entrance to each room, a photograph displays what it looked like in the 19th century, when this was still a private home. Although the collection remains the same as it was then, the current artful arrangement makes them look far less cluttered. Most of what was and is on view had been bought by the fourth Marquess, a prodigious art collector with a fortune so vast he could outbid almost anyone else. Lord Hertford spent most of his life in France; Hertford House became his store for what he had no room for there.

One may wonder how a house belonging to one man and filled with his collection bears another's name. To simplify a complex tale: Lord Hertford bequeathed his collection to Richard Wallace [4], his long-time secretary, salesroom agent and illegitimate son. Wallace, whose mother was Scottish, had been raised in Paris by Lord Hertford's mother, who pretended to be his aunt (he claimed to have learned the truth of his paternity only after his father's death.) Wallace's inheritance also included a splendidly furnished Paris apartment, an enchanting little chateau in the Bois de Boulogne called Bagatelle and a stupendous fortune (his aunt/grandmother also left a large fortune bequeathed by her father, a duke).

Richard Wallace, once flush, began adding to the collection; much of the European armour, Renaissance and medieval objects on view come from him. But mainly he devoted himself to looking after the collection and the rehabilitation of his late father's by-then inglorious reputation. (Secretiveness, debauchery and stinginess were only some of the fourth Marquess's well-documented attributes.) Wallace guarded the collection throughout the siege of Paris and the uprising that followed, and he gave millions to help survivors. Among his gifts were many beautifully sculpted, Renaissance-inspired, cast-iron water fountains; some of them remain in place today.

Soon after the siege, Wallace decided to move with his wife and the collection to London. While Hertford House was undergoing a big restoration and enlargement, he loaned hundreds of pictures and objects from the collection to a new London museum. The show caused a sensation. Five million people visited during the three years it was on public view. Lord Hertford's reputation as a discerning, major collector was secured.

Sir Richard Wallace died in 1890. He left everything to his wife. Before her death seven years later, Lady Wallace bequeathed the contents of Hertford House to the English people. It was, and is said to remain, the greatest ever single collection bequeathed to the nation. The ebullient Rosalind Savill (now Dame Rosalind) has been its director since 1992. She has enlivened the Wallace, intellectually as well as decoratively. But even now, with annual visitors numbering around 350,000, it remains a place to study and daydream.

October may produce scenes of rare frenzy at the Wallace Collection when an exhibition of 25 oils by Damien Hirst opens. He has chosen to show his work in gilded frames against walls of blue silk specially woven in Lyon. Whether this is hubris or homage, the display is bound to attract thousands of new visitors to this marvellous place.