The London museum built from a marquess's hoard, left to his son
When Lady Wallace gave about 5,500 artworks to Britain in 1897, she attached a strict condition: nothing could ever leave, not even on loan. For over a century the Wallace Collection honoured that rule. Only in 2019 did its trustees secure permission to lend. The hoard itself was assembled by a Paris recluse and his illegitimate son.
Richard Seymour-Conway, the fourth Marquess of Hertford, came from one of the richest families in Europe but spent most of his life in Paris. He rarely set foot in Hertford House, his townhouse on London's Manchester Square, treating it mainly as storage for his swelling purchases, and is said never to have visited his main English estate at all. When he died in 1870, unmarried, the titles and entailed property went to a distant cousin. His art, however, passed to Richard Wallace, the son he never legitimised.
Wallace left Paris after the Prussian siege and the turmoil that followed, bringing much of the collection to London and buying back the Hertford House lease in 1871. That same year he acquired most of his European armour by buying two celebrated collections, one belonging to the director of the Louvre under Napoleon III. Over the next decade he remodelled the house, converting stables into top-lit galleries and adding a Turkish-style smoking room tiled by Minton.
Britain's wealth of French eighteenth-century art owes much to families like this one, who bought heavily when revolutionary France sold off royal and aristocratic treasures. The collection's greatest strength is exactly that era: rococo paintings, furniture, porcelain and gold snuffboxes, shown alongside works by Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Gainsborough. Pieces are mixed together room by room, as a wealthy household of the nineteenth century would have displayed them.
The house had its own history before the art arrived. Built in 1776 by the Duke of Manchester, it served as the Spanish Embassy in the 1790s, hosted a ball for the allied monarchs after Napoleon's first defeat in 1814, and later housed the French Embassy. The government bought the lease after the bequest, and the museum opened to the public on 22 June 1900. Entry remains free.
Source: Wallace Collection
