LONDON — What do a laughing Cavalier, a Rubens rainbow, and a swinging lover have in common?
Or a quiet lacemaker, an attacking knight, Dutch old masters, and outrageous caricatures?
The answer is the Wallace Collection in London, one of the world’s most celebrated groupings of art. It has all of these images, collected by generations of English aristocrats. For the first time, it is telling the story behind its story.
A new show reveals the human factor connected to the canvases: the tastes and personal lives of four generations of the Seymour-Conway family, the Marquesses of Hertford, and Sir Richard Wallace.
An “exhibition trail” through the main galleries accompanies the lower-ground-floor show, and contextualizes key pieces in terms of family history. The trail moves through the upstairs galleries, with Dutch masters crawling up the walls, and leads into the smoking room’s cabinets filled with Renaissance decorative arts.
The masterpieces have long been on display in the permanent collection, so the show will not attract visitors purely interested in seeing the next blockbuster. Instead, it aims to enlighten enthusiasts hungry for more history.
The first three generations of the Seymour-Conway family showed tastes that adhered to the conventions of their contemporaries. The 1st Marquess collected paintings and vedute by Canaletto, and commissioned portraits of his family members.
A series of caricatures reveals the real intrigue behind this generation — the astonishing influence that Lady Hereford had over the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent from 1811 and future George IV. Though the relationship was probably innocent, it inspired caricaturists to take a more scandalous view in their satirical depictions of the rosy-cheeked prince, unruly crowds, and bosomy women.
One particularly striking image, “He Has Put His Foot In It” by Charles Ansell Williams, shows the prince stepping in the mess left by a mean-looking dog with a collar reading Hert (ford). Another nasty looking canine sits behind her with a collar reading (Yar) mouth, after the Earl of Yarmouth (the 2nd Marquess).
The 3rd Marquess of Hertford, Francis Charles Seymour-Conway, seemed more motivated by the high drama of saleroom bidding than growing a valuable and long lasting collection. A fan of Dutch genre painting, he purchased Caspar Netscher’s “The Lace Maker,” 1662, at a Christie’s sale in 1804. The masterpiece depicts a girl working intently on her craft in solitude; soft light illuminates her delicate face and plain woolen dress in her modest surroundings. Within four years of the original purchase, Seymour-Conway tried twice to sell it at Christie’s. It is good fortune that the painting now hangs on public display in Manchester Square.
Richard Seymour-Conway, the 4th Marquess, shared his father’s taste for 17th-century Dutch paintings. Like his contemporaries he bought Murillo, French 18th-century furniture and porcelain. He also bought 18th-century French paintings, which weren’t fashionable in Britain during the 19th century. Though he lived a lackluster life compared to his father’s runaway marriage and imprisonment in Verdun, his outstanding artistic eye distinguishes him from his predecessors. He was responsible for purchasing many of the masterpieces such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Swing,” Peter Paul Rubens,” “The Rainbow Landscape,” and Frans Hals’s “The Laughing Cavalier.” The Marquess won a furious bidding war with Baron James de Rothschild, buying the work for a huge sum of £2,040.
The 4th Marquess’s illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace, initially purchased Italian and French paintings and drawings, French furniture, gold boxes, Sèvres porcelain and maiolica. He later acquired the collection of the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, which radically changed the overall collection by introducing European arms and armor, Renaissance sculptures, bronze portrait medals, wax reliefs and Italian maiolica.
Sir Richard was drawn to weapons and armor for their artistic value not functionality. Museum visitors cannot miss the large equestrian armor, reconstructed to look like a knight raring to attack. However, the much smaller parrying dagger of Henry IV King of France is one of the finest pieces. Given as a wedding gift to Henry IV by the city of Paris, the weapon is damascened in gold, set with mother-of-pearl and radiates elegance and opulence. Wallace paid the exorbitant price of 12,500 francs for the dagger.
“Collecting History: The Founders of the Wallace Collection” is on view until February 15, 2015.
