Wallace Collection. The Wallace Collection is an art collection in London open to the public, housed at Hertford House in Manchester Square, the former townhouse of the Seymour family, Marquesses of Hertford. It comprises an extensive collection of fine and decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with important holdings of French 18th-century paintings, furniture, arms and armour, porcelain and Old Master paintings arranged into 30 galleries. It was established in 1897 from the private collection mainly created by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford, who left both it and the house to his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace, whose widow bequeathed the entire collection to the nation. The collection opened to permanent public view in 1900 in Hertford House, and remains there to this day. A condition of the bequest was that no object should ever leave the collection, even for loan exhibitions. The United Kingdom is particularly rich in the works of the ancien régime, purchased by wealthy families during the revolutionary sales, held in France after the end of the French Revolution. The triumvirate of The Wallace Collection, Waddesdon Manor and the Royal Collection, all three located in the United Kingdom, forms arguably the largest, most important and extant collection of French 18th-century decorative arts in the world, rivalled only by the triumvirate of the Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles and Mobilier National in France. The Wallace Collection is a non-departmental public body and admission is free. The Wallace Collection is a museum which displays the works of art collected in the 18th and 19th centuries by five generations of a British aristocratic family-the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess. In the 19th century, the Marquesses of Hertford were one of the wealthiest families in Europe. They owned large properties in England, Wales and Ireland, and increased their wealth through successful marriages. Politically of lesser importance, the 3rd and 4th Marquess and Sir Richard Wallace became leading art collectors of their time. The Wallace Collection, comprising about 5,500 works of art, was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897. The state then decided to buy Hertford House to display the collection and it was opened as a museum in 1900. As a museum the Wallace Collection's main strength is perhaps its extraordinary array of 18th-century French art: paintings, furniture, porcelain, sculpture and gold snuffboxes of the finest quality and often with illustrious provenances from great collections. Complementing the 18th-century French works are masterpieces of 16th-to 19th-century painting by some of the greatest names of European art, such as Titian, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Hals, Velázquez, Gainsborough and Delacroix, the finest collection of princely arms and armour in Britain and superb medieval and Renaissance objects including Limoges enamels, maiolica, glass and bronzes. Paintings, furniture and porcelain are displayed together to recreate the atmosphere of the grand private collections of the 19th century. The 16th-and 17th-century Hertford House was the townhouse of Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford and was in a different location, namely in Cannon Row in Westminster. His father Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, brother of Queen Jane Seymour, had started building the palatial Somerset House on the Strand as his townhouse, but did not live to complete it. The present House, in Manchester Square, was the townhouse of a later branch of the family. Hertford House was where Sir Richard and Lady Wallace lived-a London townhouse that was first built in the 18th century and afterwards continuously changed and refurbished. It was one of the numerous properties that belonged to the family, although prior to Sir Richard and Lady Wallace taking residence in 1870, it was only lived in briefly by the family in the late 18th century. In its history the house served as both the French and Spanish Embassy. In 2000 the inner courtyard was given a glass roof and a restaurant was opened named Cafe Bagatelle after the Château de Bagatelle in Paris purchased in 1835 by Francis Seymour-Conway, 3rd Marquess of Hertford. The museum display does not aim to reconstruct the state of the house when Sir Richard and Lady Wallace lived here.