More than Mere Ornaments: Female Visitors to Sir Richard Wallace’s Art Collection

Abstract

Ten months after Lady Wallace's death in February 1897, the Hertford House Visitors' Book was closed for the final time. For the previous twentythree years, this large, black, leather-bound volume had been displayed on one of the desks in the Great Gallery, for visitors to sign as part of their tour of the collection. The book begins in 1876, shortly after Sir Richard Wallace had inherited Hertford House and refurbished it as a fitting home for his magnificent art collection, and continues until December 1897, after Lady Wallace's bequest of the collection to the nation. During this period, Hertford House was a private collection that could be visited by prior appointment or on occasional open days. After 1897 the Visitors' Book became part of Lady Wallace's legacy to Sir John Murray Scott, who had been private secretary to both Lady Wallace and Sir Richard. It remained in his family's possession until the death of his sister Mary in 1943, at which point it returned to its original home at Hertford House. 1 Now one of the most important documents in the Wallace Collection Archive, it has recently been digitized and is available to view on the Internet Archive (Fig. 1).From 2017 to 2018, I transcribed the 245 pages of the Visitors' Book, deciphering the identities of the signatories. Only a handful of visitors had left comments alongside their signatures and so a mere list of names was the starting point for all the research that followed. The signatures took me on a whistle-stop tour of British, European, and American society of the late nineteenth century -and of all types of handwriting, from neat to indecipherable. The visitors cover a number of different categories: royalty, nobility, military men, art critics, historians and collectors, artists, wealthy businessmen, and men of the cloth. The overwhelming category here, of course, is men, many of whom are of great interest. Disraeli famously visited, as did Auguste Rodin, Thomas Hardy, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and many other renowned and/or wealthy men.However, the variety of female visitors to the Wallace Collection deserves special attention, for although they are less well known than 1 London, The Wallace Collection Archive (WCA), Hertford House Visitors' Book, HHVB, MS note on preliminary pages.

Looking Back: Legacies of Women Art Writers

“…In relation to collections and cultural philanthropy, Helen Jones and Imogen Tedbury productively analyse the social links that emerge across records of women visitors to the Wallace Collection and portraits in women's colleges. 60 In this latter context Dilke's jewellery might be aligned with another aspect of the legacy of women art writers: portraits speak to the representation and embodiment of a professional identity. The National Portrait Gallery holds a miniature and large portrait of Dilke by Hubert von Herkomer (Fig.…”