Earlier this week, the director and trustees of the Wallace Collection launched what they modestly termed a “transformational masterplan” for their much-loved institution.
According to the press release, Selldorf Architects, in collaboration with Purcell and Lawson Ward Studio, will “reimagine and revitalise the museum’s spaces for the 21st century”, in order to “connect diverse audiences with one of the world’s most remarkable art collections”.
The logic behind the changes was set out earlier in a document called Making Culture Matter. Proposals include improvements to “visitor welcome and circulation”, “enhancing gallery spaces”, a new Learning Centre, updating restaurant and events facilities, smartening up the staff and back-of-house areas, and improving environmental conditions.
The “masterplan”, then, mandates a substantial, six-year programme of work, designed, in the richly evocative language of the press release, to “support the museum’s evolving offer, public engagement ambitions and long-term sustainability goals”.
To explain why this bid to boost the Wallace Collection’s “offer” has not been greeted with unalloyed rejoicing, we must turn to the Wallace Collection itself.
Tucked away a few streets to the north of the could-be-anywhere squalor, low-level criminality and sense of general decline that characterises present-day Oxford Street, is Hertford House, in which the Wallace Collection is located. The building still presides over its little square, much as it has done since it was built for the 4th Duke of Manchester in 1776-78. Much altered, it retains the air of what it once was — an aristocratic London townhouse.
Once inside, the Wallace Collection feels less like a museum, more like the grandest of private residences. It was here that three generations of the Seymour family — the 3rd Marquess of Hertford (1777-1842), his son the 4th Marquess (1800-87), and his illegitimate grandson Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890) — collectors blessed with vast wealth and exquisite taste — chose to display their treasures.
In 1897, Sir Richard’s widow left the collection to the nation. Her gift included paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and ancien regime France, fine furniture, porcelain, a world-class collection of armour — all this, and the building itself. Lady Wallace stipulated that the collection should never be altered, and that it should never leave Hertford House. It took until 2019 for the Wallace Collection’s trustees to find, rather charmlessly, the legal means with which to thwart their benefactress’s wish, allowing them to loan items to other institutions.
The Wallace Collection is, at any rate, more than a storehouse of masterpieces. It’s a place with a wholly unique atmosphere. Its accessibility notwithstanding — as befits the illusion of being a privileged guest, there’s no entry charge for the main collection — it feels like a well-kept secret, some private dreamscape given material form.
It isn’t a normal museum. There’s nothing didactic about it — no project of moral indoctrination, either in the Victorian or 21st century versions. Instead, the archaic allure of the Wunderkammer — a superabundance of beautiful, intricately-wrought things — flourishes here, tugging at the imagination. Early 19th century collectors worked, more or less purposefully, to salvage flotsam and jetsam from the wreck of vanishing worlds. It’s an impulse that still finds resonance today.
Hence, I think, why people love the Wallace Collection. In an age where ugliness, vulgarity and the dumbing-down-of-everything are all too often regarded as inevitabilities rather than conscious cultural preferences, the Wallace Collection remains an oasis of elegance, intelligent pleasure, critical discernment — even that unfashionable thing, civilisation itself.
That, then, is what is at stake here.
Whether those in charge at the Wallace Collection understand this is a different question. True, the press release offers a single emollient reference to “preserving the charm and unique character of the building”— but against that, there’s the evidence of Making Culture Matter, complaining of “outdated and tired galleries” and asking for “site-wide transformation”.
Inevitably, those entrusted with great public collections are drawn to très grands projets. Many of the reasons are practical. Big corporate donors adore big building projects. It’s easier to raise money for a shiny new thing than it is to put an old thing in better working order. “Transformations” attract the attention of our largely arts-indifferent media. Controversial “reimaginings” get people talking, and sometimes even visiting, if only to see what all the fuss is about.
More profoundly, though, “transformations” elevate the role of those in charge from mere custodians of someone else’s objects, structures and traditions, with all the suppression of ego that implies, to something far more exciting: creators in their own right, surging with Main Character Energy, spending vast sums of someone else’s money in a way that will ensure their own highly personal legacy. And if the collection gets in the way, well, that’s somebody else’s problem.
As failings go, it’s a very human one. Also, it sometimes produces admirable results. Not every major overhaul of an arts institution is a mistake. But for a transformation to succeed, it is necessary for some definite problem to be solved, some defect to be made good.
In the case of the Wallace Collection, it is very unclear to me — and to others, too — that there is any major problem here at all.
Yet there is much to be lost. One hazard of these constant re-orderings is the tendency to mimic someone else’s recent triumph, which has a homogenising effect on arts institutions. This “once in a lifetime opportunity to re-visit the collection and its setting” comes only 25 years after the completion of a major Heritage Lottery funded programme at the Wallace Collection, which included excavating a basement storey and glazing over the central courtyard. Around the same time, the British Museum and V&A glazed their internal courtyards. The cellar excavations recall the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing and its temporary exhibition space, so redolent of the lower levels of a multi-storey car park.
No doubt, then, the newest masterplan will drive the Wallace Collection in the direction of becoming just a little bit more like every other public collection. To quote Making Culture Matter again:
We recognise that museums play an important role in establishing and cementing histories and setting narratives, and that these may include narratives supportive of, or insufficiently critical of, imperialist values and historical racist attitudes.
This is, itself, increasingly a tired and outdated cliché, but to the extent that it informs any reordering of the collection, it sounds a death knell for much that makes the Wallace Collection unique and enchanting.
Ultimately, though, the emphasis of these managerially-led, jargon-laden “transformations” lies less in reimagining the art, than in sidelining it in favour of commercial transactions: creating of new areas for tour groups and ticketing, a proliferation of shops and cafés, spaces tailored ever more specifically for lucrative corporate functions. It’s a sensibility more alert to those things that can be quantified — ticket sales, visitor profiles, overall revenue — than those that cannot.
I once spent an uninterrupted few minutes standing in front of Fragonard’s troubling masterpiece, The Swing — a serious meditation, for all its superficial lightness of touch, on the radical instability of earthly pleasures. These were minutes I’ll never forget.
How, though, can anyone reduce that to numbers on a balance sheet? And how, more urgently, can we rescue the Wallace Collection from the deadening forces of “transformation”?
