Wallace Collection

The collection is housed in a town mansion on Manchester Square and was assembled by the Hertford family. Alongside Fragonard hangs Frans Hals’s ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, plus armour, porcelain and furniture that once stood in Versailles. The rooms are decorated in rich colours, and the whole place feels like a lived-in home. A visit combines well with Marylebone High Street and its shops.

Background

The Wallace Collection is a museum in London occupying Hertford House in Manchester Square, the former townhouse of the Seymour family, Marquesses of Hertford. It is named after Sir Richard Wallace, who built the extensive collection, along with the Marquesses of Hertford, in the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection features fine and decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with important holdings of French 18th-century paintings, furniture, arms and armour, porcelain and Old Master paintings arranged into 25 galleries. It is open to the public and entry is free. It was established in 1897 from the private collection mainly created by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870), who left both it and the house to his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890), whose widow Julie Amelie Charlotte Castelnau bequeathed the entire collection to the nation. The collection opened to permanent public view in 1900 in Hertford House, and remains there to this day.

From Wikipedia: “Wallace Collection”, licence CC BY-SA 4.0