Another day, another museum based on some rich family’s lifetime collection of art and antiquities. London seems to have a lot of these.
The one I’m talking about in this instance, though, is the Wallace Collection in the heart of Mayfair. It is both beautiful and vast. With such an abundant collection, I imagine it would take a month—or more—to appreciate everything on display.
The Wallace Collection is essentially the collection of the Seymour family, the Marquesses of Hertford.* It fills a house that itself fills an entire city block in downtown London. It’s loaded with paintings and furnishings and it’s mostly famous for its 18th-century French art. The best part? It’s free!
In addition to all the big pieces of art, the place is filled with countless glass cases containing collections of small things like tiny watches, porcelain treasures, and religious paraphernalia. Most of the cases were covered with what looked to be leather dustcovers. I was curious, so I started lifting them up to peek at the treasures inside. Like opening leather-wrapped presents, every single one was a little surprise. But, honestly, after about the dozenth time, my intrigue began to ebb. I decided to simply assume that every case housed crown jewels.
Wandering around you might wonder just how loaded you’d have to be to not only acquire all these things, but then to casually decide, “Oh, let’s just go to our second home in Brittany and make this one a museum”? Maybe the same kind of loaded that makes it feel perfectly normal to own an entire armory just for show. Which, yes, the Wallace has—European and Asian weapons filling a whole wing of rooms, including a suit of armor on a horse.
Every room just seemed to be better and stuff with more beautiful trinkets than the last. But just as I had to stop mentally tallying the value of everything in the place (I can’t count past “priceless”), I walked the famed Great Gallery. Imagine a block-long red room massed with paintings, sculpture, and furnishings. My favorite kind of room.
Foot traffic was light the day we were there, so I attempted a people-free panorama shot with my phone. Success! But as I was checking to see how it came out, a little gnome of a man appeared as if by magic at my elbow and croaked, “You can't take video in the museum, sir.”
“What? who said that?” I said scanning the room around me.
“You can't take video in the museum, sir.” Looking down I finally saw him. “Oh, hi! It's okay, I wasn't taking a video, just a panorama photo.”
“You can't take videos OR panorama photos in the museum, sir,” he said, though I’m pretty sure the ban on panorama pictures was not clearly stated on the signs at the front desk. “Delete it,” he said. Maybe a little sternly.
“Alright, alright, don't get all worked up there, Rumpelstiltskin,” I said, chagrined and maybe a little put out. I proceeded to showily delete the panorama photo from my phone so he could see.
“And you can't take anymore photos in the museum,” Rumpel huffed, which seemed a total overreaction. I think the power had gone to his head.
It all seemed a little silly, of course, because when you delete a photo from your phone, no matter who you’re doing it in front of, you just go to the “Recently Deleted” file and recover whatever you trashed. The gnome didn't seem hip to that feature of modern technology, though.
But still, the whole thing did put a pall over my afternoon. For the rest of my visit, which really just consisted of the Armory Wing, my phone stayed firmly in my pocket. I did tell Rick to take some pictures, though. He hadn’t been told he couldn’t take anymore, after all. I was discreet, though, so he wouldn’t get booted from the museum for aiding and abetting a known criminal. See? I care.
Thankfully, by the time all of this happened, our visit was winding down.
Despite my brief tussle with the 98-year-old Art Guard in what I now refer to as “The Great Panorama Scandal of 2023,” we loved the Wallace Collection. We’ll have to go back so I can see what else is hidden under those leather cozies.
p.s. There was a special exhibit in the basement of the museum, Portraits of Dogs. You had to pay extra, but I really wanted to see it. In the very first room, I realized that I HAD to take pictures of these because, hello, portraits of dogs! At first I tried to be discreet whenever a docent was around. But it became clear that either these docents really didn’t care, or Rumpelstiltskin didn’t know how to use his walkie-talkie.
* A “marquess” is the nobility equivalent of middle management—not quite a duke, but better than an earl. There aren’t very many of them because the royal family barely made any. It’s like they tried because it sounded cool at first, but then everybody just gave up on the idea. So there are like, I don’t know, maybe 20 of them in all the U.K. They mostly just hang out, being, um,”marquessy”?
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