Welcome to Wallace Live, a database that will eventually contain information on every work of art in the Wallace Bequest. We are adding new records and images on a regular basis and are aiming to have the majority online during 2010.
Collection Highlights
Results: 12
-
Sorting:
Highlight Sorting
-
View: Lightbox 3x4
-
Functions
-
-
-
-
- Frans Hals (1582 - 1666)
- The Laughing Cavalier
- The Netherlands
- 1624
- P84
- Great Gallery
- Bookmarkable URLThe title The Laughing Cavalier was coined between 1875 and 1888, yet, as has often been pointed out, the sitter is neither laughing nor a cavalier. He wears a rich jacket embroidered with motifs common in emblem books of the time and symbolic of the pains and pleasures of love, including arrows, flaming cornucopiae and lovers’ knots, which may suggest that the picture is a betrothal portrait. One of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits, the picture’s low viewpoint and swaggering pose contribute to its sense of monumentality. At close hand the painting also astounds with its bravura technique. The vivid colours, differing textures and details of the costume are brilliantly captured by Hals’s fluid, expressive brushwork.
-
-
-
- Inkstand
- Ecritoire 'à globes'
- Manufacture de Sèvres
- Sèvres, France
- 1758 - 1759
- C488
- Back State Room
- Bookmarkable URLDesigned by Jean-Claude Duplessis père, this is perhaps the most important object in Sèvres porcelain in the Wallace Collection. Only two other examples of this design are recorded, but this one has particular prestige because it was given by Louis XV to his favourite daughter, Madame Adélaïde. Two medallions reveal this, one in centre of the tray shows the grisaille head of Louis XV and at one end is the gilded monogram MA (for Marie-Adélaïde). The celestial globe on the left (with the signs of the zodiac and piercings for stars) contained an inkwell, and the celestial globe on the right contained a globular silver-gilt sand shaker. Inside the cushion was a sponge for Madame Adélaïde to wipe her pen, and inside the crown of France, resting on the cushion, was a bell for her to ring when she wanted her maid to collect the letter she had written.
-
-
-
- Commode
- Louis XV's Commode
- Antoine-Robert Gaudreaus (1682 - 1746)
- France
- 1739
- F86
- Back State Room
- Bookmarkable URL
-
-
-
- Jean Antoine Houdon (1741 - 1828)
- Bust of Madame de Sérilly
- France
- 1782
- S26
- Exhibition Gallery 1
- Bookmarkable URLAnne-Marie-Louise de Pange (1762-99) was married to Antoine Mégret de Sérilly, Treasurer General in the War Ministry, and bore him four children. At the time this bust was sculpted they lived in a splendid house in the fashionable Marais district of Paris. In 1794, during the height of the Revolution, the couple were accused of plotting to assist Madame Elisabeth, a sister of Louis XV. Antoine was executed and Anne-Marie was spared only because she claimed to be pregnant. After two further marriages she died in 1799 at the age of thirty-six. Houdon, the leading French sculptor of his time, was renowned for his portrait busts. This superb example was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1783.
-
-
-
- Equestrian armour
- Possibly Ulrich Rämbs
- Germany, partially Landshut
- c. 1480
- A21
- European Armoury II
- Bookmarkable URLThough probably assembled and partly restored in the nineteenth century, this impressive display serves to show something of the splendour and elegance of the German ‘Gothic’ style of armour, with fluted surfaces and boldly cusped borders. This ‘field’ armour (i.e. armour for war) is recorded as having come from the Castle of Hohenaschau in the Tyrol, dynastic home of the von Freyberg family, whose armoury was dispersed in the early 1860s. Fifteenth-century plate armour is of the greatest rarity; although in this case that for the man is heavily composite, the horse armour (barding) is relatively homogenous and is in remarkably good condition.
-
-
-
- François Boucher (1703 - 1770)
- Madame de Pompadour
- France
- 1759
- P418
- Oval Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLAfter her relationship with Louis XV became platonic in about 1750, Madame de Pompadour commissioned a series of works of art with friendship and fidelity as their central theme. The Wallace Collection’s portrait, probably the last Boucher painted of his patron, evokes these ideals by its inclusion of the sculpture of Friendship consoling Love (recalling Pigalle) and in the presence of Madame de Pompadour’s pet spaniel, Inès.
-
-
-
- Snuff box
- Jean Ducrollay (c. 1708 - after 1776)
- Paris, France
- 1743 - 1744
- G4
- Back State Room
- Bookmarkable URLThis superb box, made in Paris by perhaps the finest snuff-box maker of eighteenth-century France, resembles a scallop shell and is enamelled as a white peacock’s fan-tail, in full display on the cover. Anyone standing opposite the owner of this box would therefore have the impression of the peacock displaying his tail when the owner lifted the lid. The box was owned by the duc d’Aumont, first gentleman of Louis XV’s bedchamber, until his death in 1782.
-
-
-
- Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640)
- The Rainbow Landscape
- Belgium
- c. 1636
- P63
- Great Gallery
- Bookmarkable URLIn 1635 the fifty-eight year old Rubens bought the château of Het Steen, situated between Brussels and Antwerp. Soon afterwards he painted a view of the château (National Gallery, London) and this companion piece which shows the surrounding countryside. The two pictures celebrate Rubens’s deep love for the landscape of Brabant and are the greatest landscapes he painted. The Rainbow Landscape, however, is not a simple naturalistic record. Rather it recreates a vision of his native countryside in order to convey not just what he saw, but also what he thought and felt about the land and Man’s relationship to it. Thus the rainbow recalls the covenant made between God and Man after the Flood and the harvest can be seen as Man’s just reward for his labours.
-
-
-
- Wardrobe
- Attributed to André-Charles Boulle (1642 - 1732)
- France
- c. 1700
- F61
- Large Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLThis grand wardrobe is one of two in the Wallace Collection. The main purpose of the piece was for display, but it was also fitted with shelves for storing linen or other items. The figurative, gilt-bronze mounts on the centre of the doors represent Apollo and Daphne and Apollo flaying Marsyas, mythological stories derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Boulle himself was a compulsive collector and owned a series of drawings after the Metamorphoses by Raphael, destroyed in his workshop fire of 1720. The wardrobe was once in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe House. The interior was lined with peach blossom silk and fitted with gilt-bronze brackets and hooks to hold the clothes of Queen Victoria when she visited in 1845, three years before the 4th Marquess purchased the wardrobe.
-
-
-
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
- The Swing
- France
- 1767
- P430
- Oval Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLThe Swing is Fragonard's best-known painting, encapsulating for many the finesse, humour and joie de vivre of the Rococo. No other work better demonstrates his ability to combine erotic licence with a visionary feeling for nature. According to the poet Collé, the history painter Doyen was commissioned by an unnamed ‘gentleman of the Court’ to paint his young mistress on a swing, pushed by a bishop with himself admiring her legs from below. Fragonard, who became well-known for his erotic genre-pictures, proved better suited to paint the work, in which the impudent reference to the church has been omitted, leaving the girl as the main focus, delicious in her froth of pink silk, poised mid-air tantalizingly beyond the reach of both her elderly seated admirer and her excited young lover.
-
-
-
- Wine cooler
- Workshop of Flaminio Fontana (active between: 1571-1591)
- Urbino, Italy
- 1574
- C107
- Porphry Court
- Bookmarkable URLProbably made for Cosimo I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, this monumental wine cooler bears his device of a turtle with a mast on its back, illustrating his motto, Festina lente (Hasten slowly). The inscription on its base indicates that it was made in Flaminio Fontana’s maiolica workshop in Urbino in 1574; Cosimo died in April 1574. Wine coolers were kept on or below a buffet, filled with ice, snow or cold water, to keep wine cool during meals. The decoration of this exceptionally large cooler combines white-ground grotesques, vigorously sculpted monsters and a Roman naval battle scene derived, unusually, from a drawing. The water-based theme was appropriate to a wine cooler.
-
-
-
- Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 - 1721)
- Harlequin and Columbine
- France
- c. 1715-1717
- P387
- Small Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLA masterful example of Watteau’s poetic meditations on manners, courtship and love conveyed via delicate draughtsmanship and exquisite shimmering brush strokes. Harlequin’s awkward lunging gesture towards Columbine demonstrates his inability to restrain his physical desire beneath the requisite social grace and is contrasted with the calm of the group in the background, where two lovers sit bathed in light listening to a guitarist, in harmony with the music and each other, their mutual feeling symbolized by the roses in their hair and those shown growing beside them. The presence of the commedia dell’arte characters, Crispin and Pierrot, reinforce the mood of theatrical ambiguity.
