Eclectic display ‘below stairs’ is a taste of bigger things to come
Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector The Wallace Collection, London
In guidebooks to London, the Wallace Collection, off Oxford Street, is so routinely described as a “hidden gem” it has become a cliché. Certainly, given the range of artistic riches within, the museum is poorly visited.
In a bid to boost footfall, this week the Wallace opens a £1.2million exhibition space in its basement – expertly converting an area previously used for storage and small displays.
Located at Hertford House, the one-time residence of Sir Richard Wallace (more on whom shortly), the Wallace Collection has always suffered from a lack of space to put on substantial exhibitions. Until now.
Some big-name shows are planned for 2019, including one on Henry Moore. The opening exhibition, though, is devoted to Sir Richard, the 19th-century baronet who gives the Wallace Collection its name. This year marks the bicentenary of his birth.
He was the only son of Richard Seymour-conway, the 4th Marquess of Hertford, a voracious art collector who bought the lion’s share of the pieces for which the Wallace Collection is famous: 18th-century French paintings by the likes of Boucher and Fragonard, as well as pieces of furniture and Sèvres porcelain from the same period.
The relationship between father and son was complex, to say the least. For one thing, Lord Hertford never officially recognised Wallace as his own (the former didn’t marry, meaning the latter was illegitimate).
Wallace did, however, act as his father’s saleroom assistant and adviser when he was buying art – for example, on the occasion of a furious (and ultimately successful) bidding war with Baron James de Rothschild in 1865 for Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier, bought for 51,000 francs.
Lord Hertford died in 1870 and left his art collection to Wallace. The latter went on to make a number of purchases, 20 of which have been brought downstairs for the exhibition, Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector. (Normally, they can be seen in Hertford House’s somewhat cluttered groundfloor rooms – now they are part of a spacious display and each the subject of individual attention.)
They include the gold mask of an 18th-century warrior, made by the Asante tribe of West Africa; the dagger given to Henry IV of France in 1600 by the city of Paris, on his marriage to Marie de’ Medici, and a pair of gold goblets (with a shiny blue ground, made from kingfisher feathers) used by the Qianlong Emperor in the 1740s to celebrate Chinese New Year.
Perhaps the best word to describe Wallace’s buys is eclectic. And that’s not intended as a backhanded compliment. Certain objects in this show may detain you at length – such as the 11th-century Bell of St Mura, embellished with rock crystal and amber, which was rung to call monks to prayer at an Irish monastery. Its bronze body boasts elaborate Celtic designs that recall those in The Book of Kells.
Like his father, Wallace spent most of his life in Paris. However, the Franco-prussian War – and the Paris Commune insurrection after it – prompted him to return to London in the early 1870s. He brought as much of the collection with him as he could and redeveloped Hertford House so as to best display it.
One high society visitor was the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who hailed “a palace of genius, fancy and taste”. Wallace and his wife, Julie, died in 1890 and 1897, respectively, after which – as per the couple’s bequest – their home and 5,000-piece art collection passed to the British nation.
Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector does a good job of telling the story of a man who deserves to be remembered. It’s hard to think of a single, greater art collection left to this country.
However, the show serves, above all, as a “soft opening”; a curtain-raiser for the major exhibitions to come (which will be ticketed). Good times beckon at the Wallace. To complement the existing “palace of genius” on the ground and first floors, a transformative new space has been added below stairs.