Wallace Collection

 The Wallace Collection holds a special place among the world's greatest museums.

It not only includes many internationally acclaimed works of art, but also has the rare distinction of preserving the particular tastes of one extraordinary family.

Opening Hours

Open every day of the week, Monday to Saturday 10.00am until 5.00pm, Sundays 12.00pm until 5.00pm, except December 24, 25, 26, January 1, Good Friday, May Day Bank Holiday and June 3. Café Bagatelle is also open at these times.

Location

The Wallace Collection is situated in the West End of London, just off Oxford Street. The nearest underground stations are Bond Street and Baker Street. Admission is Free.

 
The 5,470 works of art include some of the world's best-known paintings (among them Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier), over a thousand items of French eighteenth-century furniture, sculpture and porcelain (rivaling the collections at the Louvre and Versailles in France) and the finest collection of princely arms and Armour in this country. Masterpieces by Rubens, Rembrandt, Velązquez, Watteau and Boucher hang above furniture made for the kings and queens of France.

This superb collection was assembled by four successive Marquesses of Hertford and by the 4th Marquess's illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace. He inherited his father's considerable collection in 1870 and made a series of enlargements to the family's main London residence, Hertford House, to accommodate it. He lived there with his wife from 1875, displaying his existing collection and new acquisitions in both the domestic spaces and the purpose-built galleries. Despite the changes made between 1897 and 1900, when the house was converted into a public museum, it still retains a room layout largely identical to that in Sir Richard Wallace's day. Something of the domestic splendor and atmosphere of a grandiose nineteenth-century home can still be felt today.

The Collection was bequeathed to the nation in 1897 by Lady Wallace, probably reflecting Sir Richard Wallace's wishes that his collection should be made accessible to the public as a resource for art education. As the museum enters the 21st Century and its centenary year, this ambition is taken a stage further through the opening of the Centenary Project. This will offer new galleries and a Study Center to encourage visitors to enjoy the works of art in a new and more accessible way, with art workshops, object-handling sessions and special lectures. This will underpin and strengthen the staggering works of art in the existing galleries of Hertford House, which will continue to evoke the atmosphere of Sir Richard and Lady Wallace's home.