The private collections of the United Kingdom, scattered as they are all over the country, are by the nature of things not readily accessible to the general reader. But with the public galleries the case is different; and in London there exist, within half-an-hour's walk of each other, two very considerable and instructive collections which may be seen, studied, and compared at leisure. I refer, of course, to those of Hertford House and the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington.
And here, in passing, I should like to emphasise the great practical value of the comparisons which such visits enable us to make. To see, side by side, miniatures of various periods and by various masters is more informing than any amount of printed description.
The three hundred miniatures, or thereabouts, which the Wallace Collection contains, are extremely valuable, not only intrinsically, but because they present some reliable portraiture of great interest, and, especially, because they are the only examples of many eminent miniature painters which are to be found in any public galleries in this country. As with oil paintings, so with miniatures; this collection fills lacunæ. The National Gallery is remarkably—one might say unaccountably—deficient in the French School, especially of the eighteenth century (the nineteenth, as we all know, is hardly represented at all), whilst the magnificent collection got together by the third and fourth Marquis of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, and now shown at Hertford House, is rich in these masters—so rich as almost to provoke the envy of our neighbours across the Channel.
It may be well to inform such of my readers as are not familiar with Hertford House that the miniatures are all to be found in three double cases in Gallery No. XI. The light, admitted by a side window, is not over good; this window faces north, and the best time to see the miniatures is in the morning.
The arrangement, roughly speaking, is as follows:—
In case B are placed miniatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.
In case C, miniatures chiefly of the Napoleonic period and the Restoration.
In case D, miniatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a large number of small copies after François Boucher, with similar work by Charlier and others of the French school of the middle of the eighteenth century.
Thus, in the Wallace Collection we can study at our leisure a valuable series of works by several of the best French miniature painters, some of whom are not to be found represented in any other public gallery that I am aware of, even in Paris. There is, besides, a not inconsiderable number of works by good English artists, which afford instructive means of comparison, besides being interesting in themselves. Viewing, then, the collection from the various standpoints which I have enumerated, let us see what it reveals. We may here dispense with any consideration of the pecuniary value; that is a commercial view of the subject, one difficult to determine, and foreign to the object of this book. Suffice it to say that the monetary value of many of them is very great. Take the Isabeys and Halls, for example; a miniature by the latter, shown at the Exhibition of Eighteenth Century Art in Paris in 1906, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, fetched at the Mülbacher Sale no less than 60,000 francs, or £2,400.
JANET.