The story
Apsley House stands at Hyde Park Corner with the address Number One, London, because it was the first house past the toll gate as travellers came into the city from the west. It was the home of the Duke of Wellington, the general who beat Napoleon at Waterloo, and it is still lived in by his descendants while the state rooms stay open to visitors.
Its paintings arrived by an unusual route. After Wellington's army routed the French at Vitoria in Spain in 1813, they captured a baggage train carrying pictures the fleeing King Joseph Bonaparte had taken from the Spanish royal collection. Spain later told Wellington to keep them. Among them is Velázquez's Waterseller of Seville, along with works by Goya, Rubens and Correggio.
Dominating the stairwell is Canova's more than eleven-foot marble nude of Napoleon himself, which Wellington bought and set in the house of the man he had defeated.
