London: Nov 9: Wallace Collection & An Evening Outing

On Tuesday, November 9, I disappeared from work to explore The Wallace Collection.

I took pictures on this day's excursions.

The Wallace Collection is housed in the Hertford House, a sumptuous eighteenth-century mansion. The collection is of a high quality and broad scope, but even if it were not, the house alone would be worth a visit. A masterpiece of interior design, it's filled with elegantly arranged period furniture. Each room and all pieces of furniture have descriptions. The decorations and furnishings, especially the chandeliers and clocks, are artfully arranged and perfectly coordinated with the pieces on display. I found myself examining items and sections of the museum that I'd normally not be interested in simply to see how they arranged the objects and integrated them with the decor.

I'm told the collection of period furniture is the best in the United Kingdom and one of the best in the world. Having seen the V&A Museum's furniture galleries, which is the British government's museum that covers furniture, I can definitively state the Wallace's collection seems better.

The art and artifacts on display, mostly from Europe and dating from somewhere in the range of Medieval through the Renaissance to the 19th Century, are in a variety of forms, including paintings, sculptures (marble, wood, and metal), porcelain, ceramics, maiolica (wikipedia definition), pewter, Venetian glass, gold boxes, and even miniature wax portraits. Regarding painters, I saw a Rubens and several Rembrandts, Philippe de Champaignes, Titians, van Dycks, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, and Guardis. I also saw lots of paintings of dead game. (I wonder if Sir Wallace had a fascination with them.) There are also four rooms of (mostly European) armor and weapons, a more comprehensive collection than I've seen the likes of before. Like the furniture, it's probably the best collection in the U.K.

I also visited the special exhibit on Poussin to Seurat (i.e., French drawings) but it didn't excite me.

Later, I met Di Yin for dinner at Made in Italy, an Italian restaurant that caught our eyes when we walked by two weeks ago. The Neapolitan was as we hoped it would be and we left pleased. Details are in the pictures. Interestingly, although we were in an Italian restaurant in an English-speaking country, we heard the nearby tables speaking French, Spanish, and (I'm told) Lebanese Arabic.

This area, near Marylebone and Oxford, was prettily decorated at night. I took a bunch of pictures.