The story
Behind a townhouse just north of Oxford Street, London hides a private collection that was never broken up. Four generations of the Marquesses of Hertford spent enormous inherited wealth on French 18th-century art, arms and armour, and Old Master paintings. The last of the line's son, Sir Richard Wallace, added to it and moved much of it to Hertford House.
When his widow died in 1897 she left the whole thing to the nation on one condition, that nothing ever be sold and nothing ever be lent, so the rooms stay as full as the family left them. It opened as a museum in 1900 and has scarcely changed since.
On the walls are Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, the smiling young man in a lavish embroidered sleeve from 1624, and Fragonard's The Swing, the pink-slippered girl kicking her shoe into the air while her lover watches from the bushes. Around them hang Rembrandt, Titian and Velázquez, in a house arranged more like a rich family's home than a gallery.
