The Wallace Collection London: A Free Museum Hiding in a Marylebone Mansion

There is a red brick mansion on the north side of a small square behind Oxford Street, and almost everybody who walks past it assumes it is somebody's very expensive house. It used to be. Now it holds one of the best art collections in Britain, it is free, and on the January morning I went in there were about eleven people in the entire building.

The Wallace Collection London is the museum Londoners forget they have. No queue, no timed ticket, no gift shop funnel, just twenty-five rooms of Old Masters, Sevres porcelain, French furniture and suits of armour arranged exactly as a nineteenth-century collector wanted them. Here is what is actually in there and how to get the most out of an afternoon.

Hertford House, and How the Wallace Collection London Came to Be

The building came first. Hertford House was built in 1776 on Manchester Square as Manchester House for the Duke of Manchester, who wanted to be near the duck shooting in what was then open country. It did a stint as the Spanish embassy, and in 1797 the second Marquess of Hertford took the lease. It has been in the family story ever since.

The collection was assembled across five generations: four Marquesses of Hertford and then Sir Richard Wallace, the fourth Marquess's illegitimate son, who inherited the lot in 1870 and spent the next two decades adding to it. The fourth Marquess had lived largely in Paris and bought French eighteenth century art when nobody else wanted it, which is why this museum in Marylebone has a better collection of Sevres and Boulle than most French museums do.

Wallace remodelled the house between 1872 and 1882, adding the galleries at the back to hold what he had. After he died, his widow, Lady Wallace, left the whole collection to the nation in 1897 on one enormous condition: it had to stay together, in central London, and nothing could ever be added to it or lent out. The museum opened to the public on 22 June 1900 and has been free ever since. The no-lending rule held for over a century and was only relaxed in 2019, when the trustees got permission to make temporary loans.

The practical effect of that condition is strange and wonderful. Nothing here has been bought since 1897. Nothing travels. There is no touring blockbuster, no rehang, no new acquisitions wing. What you see is one family's taste, frozen, and because it cannot be lent, if you want to see Fragonard's The Swing, you have to come to this square.

The Staircase Is the First Surprise

You come in through the hall expecting a museum and get a house. The great staircase runs up from the ground floor under an arch, between columns of green stone banded with gilt, with gilded winged lions sitting on the capitals and deep red damask on the walls behind. The balustrade is a piece of eighteenth century French ironwork that came out of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which tells you everything about the scale on which this family shopped.

It is worth standing at the bottom for a minute before you go up, because the view through the arch with the red walls and the green columns is the single most photogenic thing in the building, and almost nobody stops for it. Everyone is already halfway up looking for the paintings.

The Great Gallery

At the back of the first floor is the room the house was extended for. The Great Gallery is long, high, and lit from a huge coffered rooflight, with walls of that deep red and paintings hung two and three deep in the nineteenth century way, frame almost touching frame.

This is where the famous things live. Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, who is not laughing and was probably not a cavalier, with that extraordinary embroidered sleeve. Velázquez's Lady with a Fan. Rubens's Landscape with a Rainbow. Rembrandt's portrait of his son Titus. Poussin, Titian, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Canaletto. In the middle of the floor there is a round green leather banquette, the kind you only get in Victorian galleries, and sitting on it is the correct way to do this room.

There are about 775 paintings in the collection as a whole. The Great Gallery has the loudest ones, but the pleasure of the place is that the quality does not drop off when you leave it.

The Rooms Nobody Photographs

Every room in this house is a different colour, and every one of them is fully committed. There is a blue striped room with a chandelier and full-length portraits of women in silk. There is a crimson room with a green and gilt writing table in the middle of it. There is a pink room hung with small French pictures that opens through a doorway into a green one. There are enfilades, so you stand in one doorway and see through three rooms at once, which is a deliberate eighteenth century trick and still works.

The furniture is the part people walk past and should not. Andre Charles Boulle's marquetry in brass and tortoiseshell, commodes that belonged to Marie Antoinette, and a wall of Sevres porcelain in colours that should not work together: rose pink with turquoise, apple green with gold.

There is a potpourri vase shaped like a ship that is, genuinely, one of the most absurd and lovely objects in London. The collection holds something like 510 ceramics and 528 pieces of furniture, and the small cases of gold boxes, miniatures and enamels are worth ten minutes on their own.

Total holdings are around 5,500 objects spanning the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. You cannot do it properly in one visit, which is fine, because it is free and you can come back.

The Armoury Downstairs

Go down rather than out. In the basement galleries there are roughly 2,370 pieces of arms and armour, European and Oriental, one of the great collections of its kind in the country. Full suits of jousting armour, etched and gilded, Indian and Persian daggers with jade hilts, horse armour, swords laid out in fans on the wall.

It is a completely different register from the silk and porcelain upstairs, and it is the part children like, so if you are bringing anyone under twelve, start here and go up rather than the other way around.

For Curious Minds: The Armoury That Changed Henry Moore

Here is the thing I did not know before I went, and it has completely changed how I look at that basement.

Henry Moore came to London as an art student in 1921 and started making regular study visits to the national museums. He kept coming back to this one, and specifically to the armoury, all through the 1930s and 40s. Looking back in 1980 he put it plainly: he had spent many hours at the Wallace Collection looking at armour.

It went in deep. Moore had grown up around the medieval funerary effigies in Yorkshire churches, all those stone knights in their carved plate, and he had served in the First World War between 1916 and 1918, so he knew exactly what a steel helmet was for. In the armoury here he found Renaissance helmets that were sculptural objects in their own right: a hard outer shell shaped to hold something soft and breakable.

In 1939 and 1940 he made a small lead piece called The Helmet, and it is one of the hinge moments in twentieth century sculpture. It is an outer shell with a separate form standing inside it, visible through the openings. That was the first time Moore put one form inside another, and once he had done it he never really stopped. It became the idea he is best known for: internal and external forms, a shape within a shape, the protecting outside and the vulnerable inside.

You can follow it right through the rest of his career. Helmet Head and Shoulders in 1952, then the numbered Helmet Heads, six of them, made between 1950 and 1981, including Helmet Head No. 4 of 1963, which he actually subtitled Interior-Exterior. The same logic turns up in the reclining figures and in the mother and child pieces, which are all, in the end, about one form sheltering another.

The Wallace Collection made the case properly in 2019 with an exhibition called Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads, curated by Tobias Capwell, the collection's own curator of arms and armour. It ran from 6 March to 23 June 2019 and brought together more than sixty drawings, maquettes and sculptures in plaster, lead and bronze, placed next to the Renaissance armour that set them off. It was the first show to make that connection in full, and it established that specific pieces in this building fed directly into the work.

So the armoury is not a curiosity tacked on to an art collection. It is the room where one of the biggest sculptural ideas of the last hundred years started. Worth a slower walk round than it usually gets.

The Man Whose Name Is on the Drinking Fountains in Paris

Worth knowing, because it changes how the house reads. Richard Wallace was in Paris through the Siege of 1870 and the Commune that followed. He stayed when a lot of wealthy people left, and he put his money into ambulances, field hospitals and relief for the British community there.

Afterwards, with the aqueducts wrecked and the price of clean water beyond most Parisians, he paid for a set of cast iron public drinking fountains to be placed around the city. Charles Auguste Lebourg worked up Wallace's own sketches into the design, four caryatids holding up a little dome, and they went in from 1872. There are still around a hundred of the full-size ones on the streets of Paris, painted that particular dark green, and they are known to everyone as Wallace fountains.

So the man who assembled the last third of this collection was also the man who made sure the poorest people in Paris could get a drink of water. Both things came out of the same fortune. Walking through the gilded rooms with that in your head is a slightly different experience.

Lunch in the Courtyard

The central courtyard of the house was glazed over in 2000 and turned into a restaurant, so you eat under a glass roof in the middle of the building with the galleries all around you. It is not cheap and it is not trying to be. It is, however, one of the nicest rooms in London to sit in on a wet afternoon, and unlike most museum restaurants it is genuinely a destination in its own right, so book if you want a table at one o'clock.

If you like this kind of building, the same pleasure turns up elsewhere in London behind similarly unpromising doors: the Maughan Library's Round Reading Room and the British Academy's Nash terrace are both worth chasing, though those only open to the public once a year.

Practical Notes: Visiting the Wallace Collection London

Address: Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN.

Getting there: Bond Street is the closest station at about five minutes' walk, on the Central, Jubilee and Elizabeth lines. Baker Street and Marble Arch are both about ten minutes. It sits just north of Oxford Street, so it is a very easy escape from the shopping if you have had enough of it.

Cost: free. There is a suggested donation and there are occasional ticketed special exhibitions, but the permanent collection, which is to say all of the above, costs nothing.

Opening: daily, typically from mid morning to late afternoon, closed a few days around Christmas. Check before a special trip.

Best time to go: weekday mornings. This is the quietest major collection in central London and on a weekday you can have the Great Gallery almost to yourself for stretches. Weekend afternoons are busier but still nothing like the National Gallery.

How long to allow: ninety minutes for a decent look, three hours to do it properly, and there is a good case for two shorter visits rather than one long one, since the density of stuff in each room is genuinely tiring.

Nearby: Marylebone High Street is ten minutes north for lunch and bookshops, Manchester Square itself has a garden you can sit in, and Selfridges is five minutes south if you need the opposite of a nineteenth century mansion. If you are lining up a run of exhibitions, the Bayeux Tapestry's London showing and the Courtauld, where I saw Barbara Hepworth in Colour, are both a short hop away.

The Wallace Collection London asks nothing of you except that you turn up. In a city where everything worth seeing now needs a timed ticket booked three weeks out, that is worth more than it sounds.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.