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The Wallace Collection's permanent galleries

Fragonard's The Swing, the Laughing Cavalier and an armoury, free in a Marylebone house.

HistoryArt & designPermanentFree

In Wallace Collection.

Hertford House, off Manchester Square, still furnished as a house rather than laid out as a museum, and free. Four generations of Hertfords and then Sir Richard Wallace bought eighteenth-century France when nobody else wanted it, and the result is the best collection of French painting, furniture and Sèvres porcelain outside France: Fragonard's The Swing, Watteau, Boucher, and rooms of gilt and marquetry. Elsewhere are Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, Velázquez's Lady with a Fan, Rembrandt, Titian and Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time. Downstairs is one of the finest armouries in Britain, European and Asian, several hundred pieces of it. Lady Wallace left the lot to the nation in 1897 on the condition that nothing ever leaves and nothing is ever added, so what is here is here permanently — no loans out, and none in.

Where
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1U 3BN
Nearest station
Bond Street · 6 min walk

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