Wallace Collection

So how did you ride out Storm Dennis? All the TV pictures suggested some awful plights, with folk holed up in homes watching floodwaters rise. I picked the most middle-class method possible - holed up in an art gallery looking at 18th century French Art.

So I had invited friends to London to see a comedy gig in the evening and suggested they might like to make a day of it, with the Wallace Collection one way spending an afternoon. So there we went as the weather looked a bit nasty, and when we came out at closing time it looked like we had dodged the worst of the storm.

If you have never been to the Wallace Collection, you should do. It is one very large house, the London home of the Marquesses of Hertford (hence its home is Hertford House, just off Oxford Street.) The Collection is thus of the Hertford family, although not equally between the various marquesses, some much more than others. So unlike the national collections it tends to be heavier on some areas than others. So as art collections goes it is comparatively light on Italian Renaissance, but outstanding for French Rococo.

Additional exhibition space was carved out of the basement in 2000, and a the courtyard covered over to create an expensive restaurant/cafe.

 While the whole house is a museum/gallery, part of it consists of state rooms tastefully furnished that you could imagine being lived in, while part are galleries designed just to exhibit pictures.

The armoury is truly enormous as such things go. If you want to see armour, this is the place to come.

 The picture galleries upstairs are superb, especially if you like Dutch masters. Includes the Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals, but also works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Cuyp, Van Dyck, etc.

Rembrandt's portrait of his son, Titus