The Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection is an internationally outstanding collection with unsurpassed masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish painting. The collection was given to the British Nation in 1897, and the museum first opened its doors to the public in 1900. Built over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the Dutch and Flemish paintings collection is one of the finest in the world. It contains iconic masterpieces such as Frans Hals’s famous Laughing Cavalier and Peter Paul Rubens’s Rainbow Landscape, as well as five autograph paintings by Rembrandt and several works by his school. The Dutch school is well represented with a great variety of painters working across genres, and includes works by Caspar Netscher, Gabriel Metsu, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Meindert Hobbema, Jacob van Ruisdael and Willem van de Velde the Younger among many others. The Flemish paintings range from large works by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens to Rubens’s oil sketches and small-scale cabinet paintings by the leading Flemish painters, including David Teniers II, Adriaen Brouwer, and Michael Sweerts. The founders of the Wallace Collection sought pictures of high quality with impressive provenances, features that contribute to the museum’s impressive holdings today.

Dr. Lelia Packer, Curator of Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and Pre-1600 Paintings and Dr. Lucy Davis, Curator of Flemish and British Paintings, Miniatures and Works on Paper (May 2021)