A Look at the Wallace Collection, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

It started as the biggest gift the British nation ever received and today is unique in quality, coziness, and scholarship.

L ast week I wrote about the Wallace Collection’s very good exhibition on the male portraits of Frans Hals. How can anyone not like Hals? I used the term “razzle-dazzle” in the title of the piece, since “bravura” is tired and doesn’t serve Hals well. No one paints so confidently and so freely, at least among the famous Old Masters, and no one can make a fat Dutch burgher look like a movie star. No wonder Heineken was among the show’s leading sponsors. Some of the men, as in The Laughing Cavalier and the portrait of Jasper Schade, were rich young studs and GQ- or Town and Country–worthy, but most were middle-aged businessmen. They weren’t aristocrats but bourgeois. I don’t think any of them considered themselves regal. After a few pints, I can see them all doing the Dutch “Macarena.” They’re full of life, depicted in the moment, and that’s a razzle-dazzle look.

I loved the exhibition and, of course, loved my visit to the museum. The Great Gallery is one of my favorite places on earth. Rubens’s big Rainbow Landscape is there. He painted it in 1636 for his own pleasure. At age 53 and a widower, he’d married a 16-year-old, so I suspect pleasure wasn’t in short supply but, hey, who but a drudge argues against more pleasure? It’s a thing of beauty and a bit religious in that the Old Testament rainbow signaled God’s covenant with man after the Flood: live wisely and well, and abundance will be yours.

There’s a pair of full-length van Dyke husband-and-wife portraits. Both are smashing, and both have dogs in them. Van Dyke’s self-portrait dressed as Paris is there. It’s from 1628. His cloak falls from his naked shoulders, which befit a quarterback. There are great paintings by Murillo, Velázquez, Poussin, and Canaletto, too. Everywhere you go in the Wallace Collection, you seem to find another fabulous Canaletto Venice scene. At one end of the Great Gallery is Thomas Lawrence’s full-length portrait of George IV, among the grandest of English Grand Manner portraits.

So how did all of these great things find a home in Marylebone in London? And who’s Wallace? Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890) was, everyone believes, the illegitimate son of Richard Seymour-Conway, who was the fourth Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870). He is the founder of the museum. When Seymour-Conway died, Wallace inherited a magnificent art collection assembled by four generations of Hertford marquesses.

The Wallace Collection has plenty of character. There are plenty of paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, one of my Rococo-era favorites. The Broken Mirror, from about 1762, was bought by the fourth marquess, and it must have rung a bell with him. It’s a parable on carelessness, and it’s the woman who’s careless with her mirror, a stand-in for her virtue. The Hertford marquesses left a trail of broken hearts. That Greuze blames the woman in his picture must have felt right to them. Marino Faliero was the one of Venice’s 120 doges to be executed for treason and treachery. Again, was there a bit of schadenfreude at Hertford House? Faliero got the axe. All the marquesses who assembled what we know as the Wallace were truly awful human beings but died in their beds.

The Seymour-Conway fortune came from Irish landholding starting in the 18th century. The first and second marquesses bought Canalettos and Guardis, Grand Tour fare but the very best of it. The third marquess, a crony of the prince regent, later George IV, bought Dutch paintings, exquisite Sèvres porcelain, and French ancien régime furniture. His mother, the wife of the second marquess, is supposed to have had an affair with the future king. He married the illegitimate daughter of a famous Italian dancer.

The third marchioness herself was an unusual magnet for money. She was the heiress to the estates of two rich Italians who each believed she was his daughter. She and her libertine husband lived apart for most of their marriage. When he died in 1842, the diarist Lord Greville is reported to have said, “No man ever lived more despised or died less regretted.” In Vanity Fair, Thackeray modeled the Marquess of Steyne, a “worn out, wicked old man,” after him.

He was one of the richest men in Europe. He bought Rembrandt’s Portrait of Titus (the artist’s son), The Laughing Cavalier, the Rubens rainbow painting, French Rococo paintings galore, and Lady with a Fan, by Velázquez. He preferred to buy at auction and, if he really wanted something, he’d outbid anyone and everyone, including kings and tsars. Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, the sibling brothers whose anecdotes about Victorian potentates I tend to trust, said he was “a complete, absolute, unabashed monster.” He never married and spent much of his life living in Paris.

Wallace was reared by the third dowager marchioness, not realizing until after his father’s death that the fourth marquess was his father and that she was his grandmother. As a young man, Wallace was maneuvered, Pip-like, to a job in Paris working for the fourth marquess as his secretary and manager of his art collection.

Wallace lived in Paris when the Prussians sacked it in 1870 and when the Communards briefly ruled in 1871. During the upheaval, he funded pop-up hospitals. Afterwards, notably, he paid for over 50 big public drinking fountains throughout Paris, not water coolers but big fountains dispensing clean water. These fountains, called the Wallaces, still exist. Until then, the poor drank wine for hydration. Many were drunkards. For all these and other good works, Wallace was known as the most popular Englishman in France, a distinction for which he was made a baronet in 1871.

Wallace focused on European and Asian armor and Orientalist design. Best, I suppose, to be prepared, having seen the Germans at war once. I love armor, which I see as metal sculpture, often extravagantly decorated. For children, it’s an immediate access point to the collection, but the attraction of the museum to the very young goes beyond this. The galleries, given all the grand stuff in them, are a wondrous maze for children. There are dozens of paintings of children and animals. Titillating moments are there, too. Delaroche history paintings are fun. Delacroix’s The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero is pretty and gruesome, alongside Ary Scheffer’s massive painting of writhing, nude Paola and Francesca consigned to the part of Hell reserved for the lustful. Spice for all ages is to be found.

In 1872, Wallace did something extraordinary. Though a lifelong Francophile, his short time on the barricades might have persuaded him to move to London. Having bought Hertford House from the fifth marquess, he renovated it to befit the collection. During the three-year construction project, he displayed big chunks of it to the public at the Bethnal Green Museum. Tens of thousands saw it, heartening Wallace so much that he decided to establish a public art museum in Hertford House after his wife’s death.

When Lady Wallace died in 1897, in accordance with her late husband’s wishes, she left the art to the nation. The nation’s old, I know, but I believe it’s the most valuable bequest it’s ever received. In 1900, Hertford House opened as a museum.

Walking through seems daunting at first since there’s lots of abundance, a surfeit it looks, but the place isn’t that big. Aside from the Great Gallery, rooms are domestic-scale, homey if you’re a marquess but comfortable for everyone else, too. One of the Dutch galleries is packed with small things, cows, skies, scenes of everyday life. There’s a big, festive Steen. Amid the cozy clutter are two Rembrandts, a self-portrait from 1637 and the 1657 portrait of the artist’s son, Titus. At most other museums, these two would get the Hollywood movie-star treatment, but, here, they’re at ease and delectable surprises. Titus is only 15 but looks serious. Rembrandt had just gone bankrupt. Titus and his stepmother were part of the guild-appointed committee overseeing the production and sale of Rembrandt’s sketchings to settle his bills. Serious business for a teenager. It explains his grave look and makes the portrait feel poignant.

It’s a total ambiance of paintings on lavish, silken wall coverings in saturated, sometimes neon colors, and over-the-top furniture of stellar craftsmanship linked to Louis XIV, Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon. A 1739 Gaudreaus and Caffieri chest of drawers from Louis XV’s bedroom has bronze fittings so wild that the king, on his deathbed, thought they were the flames of hell. The Boulle cabinet from the 1670s, dense with marquetry and gilding with carved caryatids representing autumn and summer, was the Sun King’s pride and joy. Many of the galleries have cases of Sèvres porcelain.

It’s not a tomb but a vibrant place, judging from the changes there over the last 20 years, my experience in spending half a day, and the museum’s plans for the future. I read the museum’s 2020–21 annual report, hot off the press. Its governance will look unusual to Americans since our museums are almost all private charities. The Wallace Collection is what’s called a nondepartmental public body, an odd name for a place that is under the umbrella of the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, the looniest combination of interests.

I tend to follow who the minister is since the department oversees British museums, and some ministers are more culture-oriented than most. Nadine Dorries is the current Tory minister. She’s a British blend of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, with time spent on reality TV shows and advocating Brexit, burka bans, and teenage abstinence. She stirs pots for a living and has no arts background, but she’s new to the job and asking lots of inconvenient questions. Of all her charges, “media” seems top of mind.

Back to the Wallace Collection. Of course, in both 2020 and 2021, the Chinese coronavirus calamity kept the museum closed to the degree that its visitorship dropped from 487,000 to 26,000. The place went digital and did it deftly. It took a financial hit from the disappearance of shop and events income, but it’s free, so losing admissions income wasn’t a worry. Its endowment generates income, and the stock market has done well.

The Wallace Collection raises money, too. Looking at its long list of donors, and reading between the lines, it’s an attractive charity. It’s prestigious, looks great, and it’s a place that’s small enough for donors to feel part of a nice community. The National Gallery, the Tate, and the Victoria & Albert, all big places, have an American friends’ group, but so does the Wallace Collection. For rich Anglophiles, it is a boutique draw and probably feels less mechanized.

The museum’s news for the year, Covid aside, might not seem juicy and big, but for those in the know, it’s both. The Wallace Collection owns The Swing, by Fragonard, a delicious and risqué painting most people know. It was cleaned last year. Painted in 1768, it had a layer of old varnish on it that, when lovingly removed, disclosed unknown details. A happy, pretty young woman swings through the air toward a young man in rapture. Removing the gunk defines and brightens both her flounces and her bits of flesh, so she’s more delectable, and flirtier. The old look of the picture and the consequent reading of it suggested that the man pushing the swing was a servant, middle-aged, dressed in black, and tucked in the bushes as the hired help would have been. A nice scrub shows he’s as much of a well-dressed blade as the young man looking to catch the young woman’s shoe or, more likely, grab her thigh. Is it a triangle, or a competition between two men, and isn’t she the sauciest minx ever?

Like The Laughing Cavalier, The Swing is a destination picture, now more than ever. The second big news is that the museum loaned a work of art. Lady Wallace’s bequest was understood for nearly 130 years to prohibit loans, but, these days, it’s not only pronouns that are in flux. In 2019, the trustees of the museum decided that Lady Wallace’s language on loans has the malleability of guidance rather than the blunt force of a mandate. The issue was Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, part of his six-painting commission from Philip IV done between 1551 and 1562.

I reviewed the Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Women, Myth, and Power exhibition a few months ago. The show, which I also saw at the National Gallery and the Prado, reunited the six pictures for the first time in 450 years. This was a historic occasion since they’re the supreme flower of the Venetian Renaissance. The third marquess bought Perseus and Andromeda in 1815. In a six-painting show about the series as a whole, it needed to go.

And go it did. Sometimes, more in the past than now, directors, curators, or, usually, registrars would say, “We are forbidden to do this or that” and add by the donor, the trust that created the place, the law of the land, or a decree from Osiris. Sometimes this really wasn’t the case, though everyone internally and externally might have believed it. A good look at language and an intuition of intent sometimes prove otherwise. Some wiggle room was found, and Perseus and Andromeda wiggled all the way to Boston and Madrid and down the road to Trafalgar Square.

This is as it should be. The Wallace Collection is filled with great things. It’s a deeply scholarly place. Curators are immersed, I learned, in research on Jean-Henri Reisener, the star cabinetmaker in Paris before the Revolution. It’s got a big and scholarly project surrounding the armor collection. Lelia Packer, the Dutch art curator, wrote the catalogue for the Hals male portraits. Loans from the collection enrich scholarship because curators at other places will interpret them in their own shows.

The museum doesn’t have a long history of special exhibitions. Its gallery, a tunnel-like space I don’t like, is only about 20 years old. I saw a very, very good exhibition of 18th- and 19th-century paintings that Indian artists did on commission from the East Indian Company. It’s the kind of idiosyncratic show only an imaginative and entrepreneurial museum would do, which means a show that’s rarely done. Last year, the Wallace Collection reunited Rubens’s Rainbow Landscape with his View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, done as its pendant in 1636. The pictures were separated more than 200 years ago. I love reunions like this.

I didn’t see the museum’s collaboration with Manolo Blahnik. I had never heard of him. He designs high-end shoes. A few years ago, I saw a Damien Hirst show there. I didn’t like it, but, a little bird told me, Hirst paid for a refreshment of fabric wall coverings in some of the galleries. These are, by the way, sumptuous and part of the place’s magic.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Inspiring Walt Disney: the Animation of French Decorative Arts at the Met. I think I’m one of the only critics who liked it. The Met did the show with the Wallace Collection. It opens in April. It’s a high-spirited exhibition that, with the name “Disney,” will attract a broad audience. The museum’s French Rococo art is probably the best outside France, so the show makes sense for them. Walt Disney and his artists didn’t specifically crib anything from French furniture or porcelain, though the Disney film Frozen quotes The Swing.  Rather, the creative team at Disney starting with Fantasia, drew from Rococo color, energy, and sweeping, asymmetrical lines. American critics can’t believe something so lowbrow as Disney could have been inspired by something as highbrow as Sèvres porcelain. They can’t see Disney animation as good art, or art of any kind. This is pure snobbery.

The annual report confirmed that the museum is about to develop a master plan “to transform the visitor experience.” These are terrifying words. During the months when the place was forced to close, it improved its HVAC system, tweaked lighting here and there, and painted the Entrance Hall a lovely marbled-yellow sienna well suited to the Boucher paintings there. Hertford House dates to the 1780s. It’s a pile that always needs work.

Perfection is never transformed for the better. It can only go down, down, down the drain. Aside from the cloakroom still being closed, the visitor experience is ideal. I’d save the money and leave things as they are.