Thanks to its self-contained site on a block surrounded by roads, the Wallace Collection, London, has no room to expand its building except by going downwards. In 2000 it marked its centenary by installing a new suite of public rooms in its basement, which included a small gallery for temporary exhibitions. This year it has celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of its founder, Sir Richard Wallace (1818–90), by enlarging the gallery, tripling the space for displays to three hundred square metres. As such relatively modest accommodation suggests, exhibitions have never been a major feature of the Wallace Collection. The terms on which Lady Wallace bequeathed her husband’s collection to the nation in 1897 are interpreted to mean it cannot lend works of art, which makes it very difficult to borrow. 

As a result, however, exhibitions here always feel like a special event, and although the opening display in the extended gallery is modest in scale – there are just twenty exhibits – and contains (with one exception) only works from the museum’s collection, it is weighty in its visual impact and revelatory in the light it sheds on Wallace. Despite giving the collection his name, he has been overshadowed in the public mind by Richard Seymour- Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–70), from whom Wallace received the bequest of works of art that transformed his life and gave the collection many of its most celebrated treasures, notably in Old Master paintings and eighteenth-century French pictures and works of art. 

Wallace has tended to be seen simply as a conduit of this collection to pass to the public, ignoring his substantial and distinctive contribution to it. There are 5,637 objects in the Wallace Collection, and of those whose provenance is known (about half) Wallace acquired 1,305. His achievement will be much better understood with the publication later this year of a biography of Wallace by Suzanne Higgott, a curator at the Wallace Collection.(1) 

Although no public declaration of paternity was ever made, Higgott concludes that on the balance of probabilities Wallace was Hertford’s illegitimate son, as was almost universally assumed to be the case during their lives. Despite this, the two men were very different. Hertford lived as a recluse with his mistress in Paris, accumulating a vast collection that he was disinclined to share with anyone. After his father’s death Wallace embraced a public career as member of parliament, generous philanthropist and a prominent figure in the art world, who was awarded a baronetcy by Queen Victoria for his charitable work. He too had a mistress, but he married her and made no secret of the paternity of their son, who predeceased him in 1887. 

The contrast extended to their tastes in art. Wallace acted as secretary and agent to Hertford, in the course of which he acquired great expertise in his father’s enthusiasms, notably French eighteenth-century art, but when he came into his inheritance he embarked on a period of concentrated buying of works of equivalent quality (and cost) but very different in kind. He focused on highly-wrought medieval and Renaissance works of art including bronze sculptures, ivory and boxwood carvings, enamels, maiolica, Venetian gla s, metalwork and medals, together with European arms and armour. The nineteenth-century appetite for such works is now strongly associated with the Rothschilds and the exhibition’s labels draw telling parallels with the Waddesdon Bequest, bequeathed by Ferdinand Rothschild to the British Museum, London, partly perhaps in emulation of Wallace’s decision to give his collection to the nation (it is a pity that the labels perpetuate the solecism of calling him Ferdinand ‘de’ Rothschild). 

The exhibition begins with a small introductory room that is presided over by a silver-gilt ostrich with a horseshoe in its mouth (Fig.14) – ostriches were supposed to be able to digest iron – commissioned in 1599 by a shooting brotherhood, the Society of the Ostrich, in Altdorf, Switzerland. It is typical of the sort of flamboyant Renaissance silver that appealed to the Rothschilds, but Wallace had a particular reason for buying it in 1872. When made a baronet the year before, he had adopted the ostrich and horseshoe as the crest on his coat of arms (which was based on the heraldry of an unrelated Wallace family) and so the bird is a symbol of the way he was stamping his identity on the collection. 

From here, the visitor passes into the extended exhibition space, a long thin room along which a dozen glass cases have been arranged in a line. Each contains a dramatically spot-lit exhibit carefully chosen to reflect some aspect of Wallace’s collecting. All are objects of extraordinary quality deserving detailed examination and leisurely appreciation. In the main gallery it is a particular treat to be able to see each item in the round. This is essential for a proper appreciation of some, such as Adam Dircksz’s intricate Gothic boxwood triptych, carved c.1500–30, or what is believed to be Wallace’s last purchase, the celebrated bronze by Barthélemy Prieur, cast c.1600, of an acrobat executing a handstand, but it is also a rare pleasure to be able to examine from so many angles such sumptuous objects as a monumental maiolica dish painted in Gubbio in 1525 with a scene of nude women bathing, attributed to the most celebrated of all maiolica artists, Xanto. 

On one end wall is the sole loan, an 1880 painting by Blaise Alexandre Desgoffe depicting objects from Wallace’s collection (Fig.13), flanked by two of them, a superb boxwood sculpture of Hercules wielding his club, carved by the Paduan goldsmith Francesco Pomarano c.1520, and a large silver basin, reputedly Portuguese, which is decorated with representations of the cosmos partly based on engravings made in 1563 by the German artist Nicolaus Wilborn. The latter is an object that aroused Ferdinand Rothchild’s particular jealousy. He must also have admired Wallace’s Renaissance jewellery, although – like the Rothschilds’ and other collectors’ acquisitions in this notoriously treacherous field – Wallace’s purchases included pieces heavily adapted or made entirely in the nineteenth century. He was also enticed by glamorous provenances, many of which have not stood up to modern scrutiny. Nonetheless, his en bloc purchase in 1871 of the art collection of the comte de Nieuwerkerke, Napoleon III’s former surintendant des Beaux-arts, was the foundation of a collection of arms and armour of regal quality. The examples shown here include an ornamental dagger of c.1599 that belonged to Henri IV and sumptuous parade armour made c.1575–90, perhaps for Alfonso d’Este. 

The exhibition emphasises the geographical breadth of Wallace’s acquisitions, ranging from Ireland, in the form of a reliquary bell associated with St Mura, late eleventh-century in origin, to Sri Lanka (or possibly Goa), the origin of a rock-crystal and gold sculpture of Christ as the Good Shepherd. Particularly eye-catching are a pair of eighteenth-century Chinese wine goblets, one of gold, made for the Qianlong emperor to celebrate New Year in the Summer Palace in Beijing. More to modern taste, perhaps, are the items of gold sculpture and jewellery looted by the British from the Asante capital, Kumase (in present-day Ghana), in 1873 and sold by Garrard’s in London. Wallace’s purchases included the poignant trophy head exhibited here (Fig.15), probably once the head of a ceremonial sword, which depicts a defeated warrior. 

The inclusion of a magnificent casket of Vincennes porcelain with silver-gilt mounts is a reminder that Wallace also collected works of the type that had so appealed to his father. The exhibition does not attempt to represent his taste in paintings, although around eighty of the Old Masters in the Wallace Collection were bought by him and it is likely that it was his influence that persuaded Hertford to extend his collecting of pictures and sculpture back before 1600. Other important aspects of Wallace’s collecting, such as contemporary painting (notably James Tissot and Ernest Meissonier) and modern British manufactures and design, are only sparsely represented in the Wallace Collection. Nonetheless the exhibition makes it possible to appreciate as never before the range of Wallace’s taste and the extraordinary quality of his gift to the nation.

1. Sir Richard Wallace: Connoisseur, Collector, Philanthropist will be published by Pallas Athene. A draft of the text was made available to reviewers of the exhibition. There is no catalogue of the exhibition, nor are the exhibits numbered.

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