Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet

right|thumb|Sir Richard Wallace

Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet (21 June 1818 – 20 July 1890) was a British aristocrat, art collector and Francophile. Based on the Return of Owners of Land 1873, he was the 24th richest man in the United Kingdom and the 73rd largest landowner, holding in total in England and Ireland, with a total annual value of £86,737. In addition he had valuable property in Paris and one of the greatest private art collections in the world, part of which, now known as the Wallace Collection, was donated to the UK Government by his widow, in accordance with his wishes.

Origins and youth

Richard is believed to have been the illegitimate son of Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870). He was born in London on 26 July 1818, to a certain Agnes Jackson, who according to Burns (2008) was in reality Mrs Agnes Bickley, the wife of Samuel Bickley, an insurance underwriter and member of Lloyd's of London, and a daughter of Sir Thomas Dunlop Wallace, 5th Baronet (1750–1835), of Craigie Castle, Ayrshire, born "Thomas Dunlop", who had adopted the additional name and style of baronet on inheriting the Craigie estate of his grandfather Sir Thomas Wallace, 4th Baronet. It is unclear why his mother had adopted the surname Jackson, as she remained married to Samuel Bickley at the time of Richard's birth and bore Samuel legitimate children both before and after the birth.

Richard's natural father, the 4th Marquess of Hertford, after whom he supposedly gained his first name, would have been 18 years old at his birth, and is supposed by Burns (2008) to have met Agnes in Brighton whilst serving in the 10th Hussars Regiment. Later in life, after 1870 during his court case concerning his contested inheritance from the 4th Marquess, Richard declined the opportunity to put his origins on public record, stating merely that "he had been brought from London to Paris in 1825 aged 7 with his nurse". Richard lived with Mie-Mie for the next 17 years until 1842 (two years after he had fathered his own son by his mistress) and the two developed a close bond. The 4th Marquess mentioned in his will the kindness that Richard had shown to his mother. He referred to her as "Aunt" and she to him as "Dear Nephew". This close relationship may have been sealed by the fact that both were illegitimate, Mie-Mie being the natural daughter of William Douglas, 4th Duke of Queensberry by his Italian mistress. "They both suffered the stigma of illegitimacy, at a time when bloodlines in humans were as important as in horses. They both had to endure whispered gossip the moment they turned their backs, and the trail of scandal wherever they went" (Fairweather, 2021). Long after her death Wallace erected a monument to Mie-Mie in Sudbourne Church (the only one there to a Hertford in 120 years of residence) in the form of the stained-glass east window depicting Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who washed Jesus's feet with oil but was also the first person to witness the Resurrection, which Fairweather (2021) suspected to be "an intentional reference to Mie-Mie's circumstances".

Career

Most of his youth and early manhood were spent in Paris, "where as Monsieur Richard he became a well-known figure in French society and among those who devoted themselves to matters of art". In this capacity he became expert in assessing, valuing and buying works for the famous collector. Before he was forty he had made his own large collection including objets d'art, bronzes, ivories and miniatures, which he sold profitably in Paris in 1857,

Inheritance

In 1870 his father the 4th Marquess died without legitimate issue, and the titles and entailed estates, including Ragley Hall in Warwickshire and Sudbourne, passed under an entail to his second cousin, Francis Seymour who became the 5th Marquess. However Wallace inherited his father's unentailed estates and extensive collection of European art.

Lisburn, County Antrim, Ireland

thumb|Wallace House, Lisburn, built by Wallace as his residence, and for his son, but little used|left

His vast estate in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, extending to over , produced an annual income of £50,000 (£7 million in 2022). The area was the centre of the flax and linen industry. When Wallace visited it for the first time after his inheritance, accompanied by his wife and son, he was greeted by a crowd of 20,000 people and was welcomed in an elaborate series of ceremonies by the chief citizens. During his eleven years in the House of Commons, Hansard records but one significant intervention: Wallace spoke in support of an amendment to the Land Law (Ireland) Bill of 1881 defending, in the sale of tenancies, the pre-emptive rights of the landlord.thumb|The Wallace Memorial, Castle Park, Lisburn, erected in 1892Wallace built a grand residence in the Lisburn for himself, called Wallace House, more exactly intended for his son whom he intended to establish there to perform the functions of a great landlord, designed by the same architect who had remodelled Hertford House. He made many large charitable donations to the town, and was reputedly admired by the inhabitants. After his death various monuments were erected in his memory including two stained glass windows in Lisburn Cathedral, on the south wall of the chancel and on the south wall of the nave, one financed by public subscription, the other by Lady Wallace. In "grateful recognition of his generous interest in the prosperity of the town", in 1892 residents of the town erected a memorial in Castle Gardens. The Wallace Memorial comprises a 40 foot high stone and marble "square-plan tower with a steep crocketed spire topped with a poppy head finial, the front gable bearing a date and coat of arms, niches on each façade, one bearing a bust of the subject above an inscribed tablet, and on a three-stepped octagonal base". It is inscribed: It was a notable sporting estate of about , and where he held lavish shooting parties, guests at which included the Prince of Wales. He employed 24 liveried gamekeepers and "a small army of domestic servants" also visible on several other houses and buildings erected by him on the estate. In 1883 he won a silver medal at the Smithfield Show as breeder of the best "Single Pig" in class LXXXVI. During 1879–82 he restored Sudbourne Church, and presented it with new furnishings. In Scott's time it is described by Vita Sackville-West in Pepita (1937).

2 Rue Laffitte, Paris

thumb|Centre, corner house with full-height bowed-projection at the corner, 2 Rue Laffitte, Paris, residence of the 4th Marquess of Hertford and then of Sir Richard Wallace. Boulevard des Italiens zu Paris, by Jos. Scholz, painted 1829/80. Rijksmuseum.|left2 Rue Laffitte, Paris, formerly the hôtel d'Aubeterre or townhouse of the Aubeterre family, with a full-height bowed-projection at the corner, was situated on the corner of Rue Laffitte and the Boulevard des Italiens. It faced on the other side of the Rue Laffitte the famous Restaurant de la Maison-d'Or. The street contained the shops of several art dealers. It was purchased by the 4th Marquess of Hertford, when his mother vacated it to live at 1 rue Taitbout, the next street 50 metres to the west. After Wallace's death it was eventually inherited by his secretary Sir John Murray Scott, during whose ownership the house and contents are described by Vita Sackville-West in Pepita, her biography of her mother Lady Sackville (Scott's mistress), who ultimately inherited the contents, which she sold in 1914 to the dealer Jacques Seligmann for £270,000 (£35 million in 2022) and of which the Wallace Collection was therefore deprived:thumb|The same view in 2022 of the site of the former Hertford-Wallace-Scott residence, now the site of the headquarters building of BNP Paribas bank, "16 Boulevard des Italiens"

:"A vast apartment on the first floor turning the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Laffitte with twenty windows opening on either street was in itself a treasure-house which brought visitors from every part of Europe. I shall never forget the enchantment of that house. From the moment one had pulled the string and the big door had swung open admitting one to the interior courtyard where grooms in wooden clogs seemed perpetually to be washing carriages; the whole house belonged to him though he reserved only the first floor for himself .... the real glory of the house lay in the main apartment—room after room opened one into the other so that standing in the middle one could look down a vista of shining brown parquet floors at ivory-coloured boisieries on either side. Here indeed one had the 18th century illusion at its height. All around silent and sumptuous stood the priceless furniture of the Wallace Collection."

Siege of Paris and the Wallace fountains

thumb|Richard Wallace caricatured as a Parisian [[Wallace fountain by Georges Lafosse published in Le Trombinoscope|left]]

Wallace achieved fame during the Siege of Paris for notable acts of charity. Rather than take refuge on one of his palatial estates, he had remained in his Parisian villa from where, at his own expense, he organized two field hospitals (or ambulances as they were then called); one to serve French wounded, and the second for the benefit of sick and destitute Britons.

By the end of the siege, Wallace is estimated to have privately contributed as much as 2.5 million (1870) francs to the needy of Paris. The last balloon to leave Paris before its capitulation was named in recognition of his services, as was a Paris boulevard, and he was made a chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

In 1872, Wallace financed the reconstruction of the war-damaged Protestant Temple in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He also donated a total of 70 drinking fountains to the city. As a result of the siege and of the violent suppression of the Paris Commune that followed, many aqueducts had been destroyed, obliging the poor to draw on the polluted waters of the Seine. The still extant, cast-iron, Wallace fountains are of a renaissance design executed by the sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg. Two donated by Wallace are to be found in Lisburn (one in Castle Gardens and one in Wallace Park) and replicas exist at various locations worldwide.|left]]

On 15 February 1871, six months after the death of the 4th Marquess and having received his paternal inheritance, he married his long-term mistress Amélie Julie Charlotte Castelnau (1819–1897). He had met her in his youth when she was working as a dressmaker or sales-assistant in a perfume shop.

On 24 November 1871, six months after the marriage, Wallace was created a baronet, "of Hertford House, London", in recognition of his assistance to English ex-patriots during the Siege of Paris, and the couple moved to the house in London.

Via Mie-Mie, wife of the 3rd Marquess and illegitimate daughter of the 4th Duke of Queensberry, in 1881 the Hertfords inherited further property, the Queensbury Estate, at Newmarket, Suffolk.

Illegitimate Issue

Thirty years before their marriage Wallace had an illegitimate son by Amélie, But permanently illegitimate under English law (but not under French law) he was unable to inherit his father's baronetcy. He served in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War, under General Joseph Vinoy, Bohemian by nature, he was unwilling to conform to Wallace's wish for him to become an English gentleman and to reside on the Lisburn estate in Ireland. and to his four illegitimate children in France causing a split with Wallace that was unresolved at the time of his early death in 1887, aged 47. The three grandsons were to have distinguished careers in the French military. The Wallace Collection remains today in its essential character the product of the 4th Marquess, "one of the greatest collectors of the nineteenth century", The Collection is now located in Hertford House in Manchester Square, London, Wallace's townhouse, which the Government purchased from Sir John Murray Scott.

References

External links

The Life and Work of Sir Richard Wallace Bart. MP
Website of the Wallace Collection
The Wallace High School
Lisburn City
Lisburn City Council