The Wallace Collection

The same new friend who introduced me to the hidden bars in London that I mentioned last time has, in fact, shown me around quite a bit and he's teaching me a lot about this city. As a Frenchman and a true connoisseur of fine cuisine from all over the globe he's able to show me all the best places to eat in London. Meaning I am learning which restaurants have Michelin stars, which places have the most phenomenal presentations and service, where to go for the best tasting food versus where you'll find the most expensive food (whether or not it's good), and any other trivia in a similar vein of knowledge. And he knows because he's been to all of them, usually more than once.

I can't remember half of what he's told me as far as food goes but I have retained other information of a peculiarly unusual nature that he shared with me on our third outing.

The Swing; Fragonard

Knowing me to be a lover of the arts he proposed we visit a museum with one of the finest collections of art ever assembled by a single family. The Wallace Collection, as it's now called, “was established in 1897 from the private collection mainly created by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870), who left it and the house to his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890), whose widow bequeathed the entire collection to the nation. The museum opened to the public in 1900 in Hertford House, Manchester Square, and remains there, housed in its entirety, to this day. A condition of the bequest was that no object ever leave the collection, even for loan exhibitions.”

The museum's collection numbers nearly 5,500 objects and is best known for its quality and breadth of eighteenth-century French paintings, Sèvres porcelain and French furniture, though the rooms full of decorative guns and weaponry caught my particular attention. Clearly, one of the family's collectors loved the inlaid wood and porcelain designs.

The End of a Game of Cards, JLE M

On the second floor I discovered my new favorite artist. Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, a predominantly self-taught French artist with very little traditional training, became highly successful for painting small-scale but meticulously detailed oils. His style is very similar to the Dutch masters but I prefer his subject material to theirs, mainly portraits of 17th and 18th century characters placed in much less formal, structured settings and stances. In fact, many of his characters appear mid-movement or in nontraditional positions. Apparently others in the past agreed with my taste because during his lifetime he became a huge success and his miniature oils were highly sought after.

An Artist Showing his Work; JLE M

It's rare that I find a single artist I truly love and appreciate THAT much. The fluidity of Meissonier's paintings make the surfaces appear almost photographic in quality, so smooth you can barely identify the brush strokes even when your eyes are inches from the canvas. You can tell a truly, truly gifted artist by his representation of a human face. Portrait painters, therefore, get my highest respects because I understand how difficult it is to accurately duplicate a lifelike human face that also resembles the subject. Meissonier, in this sense, represents one of the greatest painters, in my humble opinion, particularly since his painting are done on such a small canvas and yet exhibit vivid realism. But his detailed work extends beyond the main human subjects. Instead of loosely addressing the background like many classical painters had, Meissonier put just as much effort into the negative space around the foreground characters as he did into the characters themselves, creating a truly lifelike image.

Polichinelle; JLE M

Click HERE for additional images.

Though my attentions were directed toward the painting galleries for much of our Wallace Collection voyage, I was also taken with the set of antique books on display. As most of you know, I collect beautiful antique books as well, more for aesthetic reasons than anything, for I know very little about their true worth in terms of monetary value. It was when I made this comment to my friend at the museum, however, that I gleaned some sensational information.

I'm ashamed to admit, as a true lover of both the written word and of beautiful books that I was completely ignorant of the Valmadonna Trust Library, a collection of 13,000 books and manuscripts, assembled over the lifetime of the industrial diamond merchant Jack V Lunzer, who was at this point in the day described to me in detail.

Lunzer lives in London and his “collection’s geographical scale is matched by its temporal breadth, which extends over a millennium. But this endeavor is not just an exercise in bibliophilia. These are all books written in Hebrew or using Hebrew script, many of them rare or even unique. Most come from the earliest centuries of Hebrew printing in their places of origins and thus map out a history of the flourishing of Jewish communities around the world. The collection’s historical gaps and boundaries are also revealing because they often implicitly mark periods of decline, which, we learn elsewhere, often meant public conflagrations of copies of these very books or even exterminations of the communities themselves.”

According to my friend, Lunzer's most prized acquisition is a rare edition of the Babylonian Talmud, (1519-23), “made by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice...” specifically for Henry VIII, who sought to divorce his wife under Jewish law, since Catholicism outlawed the practice. But instead, as King, Henry VIII as we all know created his own church, all before the books reached him. As a result, “This set made its way into the collection of Westminster Abbey, where Mr. Lunzer saw it, covered with dust, untouched for centuries. He ultimately acquired it in a trade, offering a 900-year-old copy of the Abbey’s original Charter.”

“There is also a 12th-century scroll of the Hebrew Pentateuch that came from the Samaritans, a Jewish sect that still exists in Nablus on the West Bank, their ancient Hebrew script resembling inscriptions on archaeological finds rather than the letters that came to define mainstream Hebrew.

And there are manuscripts of almost voluptuous variety: a 19th-century copy of “A Thousand and One Nights” from Calcutta, its Arabic spelled out in Hebrew script; the first scientific work printed in Portugal in 1496 by Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astrologer and mathematician; an early-20th-century manuscript from Pakistan with Hebrew and Marathi on facing pages — a guide for ritual slaughterers.
Hebrew printing lasted only about 10 years until the 1560s. Every one of the Hebrew books printed there in that era, Mr. Lunzer says, is represented here.

Many volumes are prayer books or rabbinic commentaries, but seen here the collection becomes a reflection of almost doctrinal bibliophilia.”

Yeah.

The collection, which is to be sold only in its entirety, is estimated to be worth about £50million, one the the largest personal collections in the world....ever.

That's one way to feel humbled.