Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur (Exhibition, 28 March-26 October 2025)
The Wallace Collection at Hertford House is a gem of the London museum scene. Housed in an elegant eighteenth-century mansion of pleasing proportions, it contains a treasure-trove of artefacts – not just paintings, but also armour and armaments, beautiful furniture, stunning porcelain, and even some objects which defy categorisation. It is always a pleasure to wander through the rooms, for, as with the John Soane museum, each time you will find something that you did not notice before. However, unlike the Soane, there is plenty of space in the Wallace Collection and it is rarely crowded, so that you can take your time and really look at the items on display.
The history of the collection is also the story of the Seymour-Conway family. Francis Seymour-Conway (1719-94) was created the first Marquess of Hertford, and he began collecting art – six of the Canaletto paintings that he bought are still on display in the house. Throughout the next four generations each Marquess added to the collection, the principle motive being their personal taste rather than what was particularly fashionable. The last Marquess, who never married. passed the responsibility of maintaining and expanding the collection to his illegitimate son Richard Jackson. The latter took the surname Wallace, his mother’s maiden name, and as a young man worked as a secretary to his father and oversaw many of his art purchases. Wallace was left a substantial fortune and added significantly to the collection, particularly in the fields of miniatures, arms, and armour. He willed the house and its contents to his wife, and when she died she bequeathed everything to the nation. Between 1897 and 1900 some alterations were made to improve the building’s accessibility to the public, and later that year it opened as a public museum.
The collection does not simply comprise the sum total of one family’s taste but contains a wide diversity of objects, most of world-class quality. If we look, for example, at the paintings on display, four particularly stand out: Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, Rembrandt’s Titus, The Artist’s Son, Fragonard’s The Swing and Gainsborough’s Mrs Robinson (Perdita).These are, without question, amongst the finest paintings that each of these artists ever produced, but there are many, many more which more than justify a visit. Added to those already mentioned are significant works by Rubens, Poussin, Delacroix, Van Dyck, Canaletto, and Velazquez, as well as a fascinating group of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings by de Hooch and others.
One painting worth considering in more detail, as it is significant for the history of the house and family, is a superb portrait of George IV painted by Thomas Lawrence in 1822, while the subject was still the Prince of Wales. George was a close friend of the second Marchioness of Hertford and her husband, and their son would later would advise the king on the purchase of various artworks. Indeed, it is probable that the Marchioness had been George’s mistress while he was Prince of Wales. Rather peculiarly, George gave the Marquess the painting that he had commissioned from Gainsborough of his first mistress, the actress Mary Robinson, known as ‘Perdita’ from her breakthrough role in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.
Although one’s attention might initially be captured by the paintings, the house is full of unexpected further treasures. Much of the collection was purchased in the nineteenth century when French pre-Revolutionary furniture, porcelain and other objets d’art could still be acquired at reasonable prices. The quality of much on display is world-class, and it is remarkable that these objects are contained in such an unassuming building. The display of weapons and armour is not necessarily an attraction for modern-day audiences, yet when some of these objects were made they were at the very height of both fashion and desirability. A closer look at many reveals a truly outstanding level of craftsmanship. Amongst the items is a suit of armour made around 1587 for Sir Thomas Sackville, Lord Bathurst. It may have been ordered in preparation for action the following year when the Spanish were preparing to invade. The suit comprises more than twenty separate gilded, highly-decorated pieces. Each is a work of art in itself, in addition to its specific role in keeping the wearer safe. The suit confirmed the owner’s status, setting him apart from his peers in wealth and taste. Today it remains a supreme example of the armourer’s skill, probably the work of Jacob Halder, master armourer at the time at Greenwich.
In contrast, the Wallace Collection also recently hosted a Grayson Perry exhibition. Perry has become something of a national treasure: whether as one of his alter egos or as himself, he has consistently produced art that has challenged and engaged his contemporary audience. I last saw an exhibition of his work in Bristol a few years ago. On display were the six tapestries which make up the sequence The Vanity of Small Differences together with the preparatory drawings and sketches, which showed in some detail the development of the final versions. The sequence was directly influenced by Hogarth’s TheRake’s Progress and is a reworking of the same subject, the corruption of wealth and the moral laxity of contemporary life. Hogarth’s set of pictures follows Tom Rakewell as he squanders his fortune, marries not for love but for money, and eventually ends his life in the terrifying Bethlehem insane asylum (the origin of our word “Bedlam”). In Perry’s modern version, Tim Rakewell is born into a working-class family, of which he is the first to go to university, develops new software which he sells to Richard Branson for a fortune, marries a second wife above his original social station, and finally dies in a car crash in his new Ferrari. His blood-stained body lies in the centre of the scene, echoing Hogarth’s final vision of Tom Rakewell in Bedlam. While Perry has taken the basic scenarios from Hogarth, he has altered their focus, confronting us with class differences and the modern perils of ostentatious wealth.
Apparently Perry has been visiting the Wallace for some time and has often helped out there in various ways. Over a lunch with the director he mentioned that his sixty-fifth birthday would be coming up in a few years, and together they hatched the idea of an exhibition in which Perry would produce new work in response to the objects and paintings at the Wallace. As followers of Perry’s work will know, much of it is autobiographical, but it also often depicts the fictional life of an imagined person. Here we are confronted with Shirley Smith, a woman whose complete biography is printed in the excellent catalogue. She was born in 1930 into a violent and dysfunctional family in the East End, spent some years in care, and after being found wandering the Wallace Collection in a psychotic state she was sectioned and hospitalised for twelve years. On her release she adopted the name ‘the Honourable Millicent Wallace’ and claimed to be the legitimate heir to the house and collection. She would visit it often, and it inspired her to draw. Many of ‘her’ drawings were displayed in the exhibition alongside Perry’s ‘own’ pieces. He has mastery of a wide range of media including drawing (obviously!), pottery, painting, tapestry, furniture, and metal-work, and his ability to react to the different objects on display at the Wallace in ways that correspond to the objects themselves is itself impressive. Add to this the sheer quality of his works, and the result was an overall very pleasing exhibition.
Lord Bathurst’s suit of armour has already been mentioned, and some of Perry’s show responds to these types of objects in the Wallace collection. In the centre of one room is what can only be described as a grotesque metal headpiece of steel and brass, but unlike traditional helmets it has a complete face, with savage teeth and glaring eyes. On the front of a kind of metallic plume are the words CRY BABY and MUMMY’S BOY, while the back has HYPOCRITE and MILQUETOAST. Perry is clearly highlighting the bizarre dichotomy involved in producing beautiful objects to be used in potentially lethal violence towards other men: his work seems to imply the turning of such violence upon the wearer. It is a genuinely unnerving object that becomes more hideous and thought-provoking the longer you look at it. You certainly would not want to see a whole suit of armour in this genre!
Far more appealing in many ways is a very ambitious piece entitled The Great Beauty. This is a piece of decorated furniture, described as an altarpiece made from oak, brass, and ceramic. It combines features from several different Wallace Collection objects. Based on the Honourable Millicent Wallace’s imagined life, the front and side panels are adorned with female portraits inspired by the miniatures in the collection, depicting figures who, in Shirley Smith’s mind, would have been her distant relatives and their friends. Each portrait is in the Smith style, showing women in period dress from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most are young — as in the original miniatures— and are smiling, although a few have rather enigmatic expressions, again like the originals. The piece is brightly painted, and here Perry seems to be criticising some of the more ostentatious furniture in the Wallace Collection, such as an oak and pine cabinet probably made by Charles Boulle (later restored by Levasseur), veneered with Macassar and African ebony and further decorated with turtleshell marquetry and an oval-shaped cartouche depicting the abduction of Helen. Each part of the Boulle cabinet is decorated symmetrically, even the feet and hinge plates. It is an extraordinary piece, yet for all its intrinsic beauty it is also problematic: the expense involved, not only for the materials, but also the craftsmen’s time and expertise, would have been extraordinary even for the period in which it was made. It represents an extravagant display of wealth at a time when many lived on or below the bread line.
Besides the illustrations on The Great Beauty, a whole section of the exhibition is devoted to drawings by ‘Shirley Smith’ of her imagined past. Several show her as a child at Hertford House. In one she is reading with her mother in the garden, in another she is sitting up in bed as a servant brings her breakfast; the bed is quilted and her monogram MW is embossed on the headboard. In a third she stands in a walled garden brandishing a sword, perhaps a reference to an incident in Smith’s early life when, as a homeless teenager, she stabbed a homeless man who had attacked her.
Of course, Perry also responds to the Wallace Collection paintings, and chooses one of the most famous with which to continue the story of Shirley Smith, The Swing by Fragonard. Perry’s response to this is rather unsettling: in the tapestry by ‘Shirley,’ the girl on the swing is the only figure remaining from the original trio. The word Fascist can be seen faintly in various places, the explanation being that the work was sewn by ‘Shirley’ onto a cheap fabric which already had the word printed on it. Unlike the original, in which the girl is grinning mischievously, in the tapestry she has a wild-eyed demonic quality, surrounded by an explosion of coloured swirls and a mass of bright red and blue. The lush woodland setting has been transformed into a nightmare vision where chaos reigns supreme and strange figures are emerging from the background.
Finally, of course, there is the pottery. Perry initially made his name in this medium, and he displays his unique qualities in his homage to the Wallace’s magnificent ceramics, many from Sèvres and originally produced for the French royal family, including Louis XV, Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, or wealthy court aristocrats. My favourite of the new pots on display has to be Alan Measles and Claire meet Shirley Smith and the Honourable Millicent Wallace. Alan is Perry’s teddy bear and, in his own words, “the benign dictator of his imaginary world,” and Claire, of course, is Perry’s female alter-ego. On one side Alan is shaking hands with Shirley Smith as the Honourable Millicent stands nearby with Claire in the background. On the reverse are Sir Richard Wallace and his wife, who look on as a distraught Shirley stabs the man who attacked her on a bomb site in the East End of London. Above the pot is red and black, suggesting the fire and smoke of the Second World War air raids. The mixture of invention and reality creates a powerful and reproachful work: while the biography of ‘Shirley’ may be imaginary, it is based on the real tragic experiences of the girls and women who sleep rough in our cities now.
The Wallace Collection is worth several visits for the quality of the pieces on show, and Perry’s exhibition fully absorbed, but also questioned, the spirit of the place and made a memorable contribution to its enduring appeal. He showed himself yet again as a very versatile artist whose imaginative world reflects an indepth understanding of the real world’s cruelty, injustice, and hypocrisy.--Paul Flux
