Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection is a London museum of art with private origins that is now a state institution. Its core comes from the collection assembled by the fourth Marquess of Hertford, to which Sir Richard Wallace, probably the Marquess's illegitimate son and in any case his secretary, added further pieces such as European arms and armour and Eastern and African metalwork. After the death of his widow, who bequeathed the property to the nation in 1897, the museum opened in 1900 at Hertford House, the family mansion on Manchester Square, where the picture collection remains today.

The paintings are of international reach. Among the best known works are Fragonard's The Swing, Velázquez's The Lady with a Fan, Titian's Perseus and Andromeda, Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier and Poussin's The Dance of Human Life. The museum also holds several works by Rembrandt, as well as paintings by François Boucher, Pieter de Hooch, Rubens and Anton van Dyck. The most important pictures hang in a large gallery on the main floor, refurbished in 2014 with red wall coverings and a glass ceiling that admits natural light while blocking ultraviolet radiation.

The holdings span fine and decorative arts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century and are especially strong in eighteenth-century French painting, Sèvres porcelain and French furniture, with notable examples by André-Charles Boulle. One room is unique in the world for its objects that belonged to Marie Antoinette. Admission is free.

For more than a century the terms of the bequest ruled out lending. In 2019 the trustees reinterpreted them as allowing temporary, prudent loans compatible with conservation, and in 2020 the collection lent a painting for the first time: Titian's Perseus Freeing Andromeda.