Transforming The Dutch Galleries at The Wallace Collection

Over the past year the East Galleries on the first floor have been closed. This was due to major refurbishment work that we have been doing behind the scenes. Museums galleries have a life span of about 25 years before they have to be redone, as has happened here. The East Galleries have been very gloomy and were the darkest part of the building. In the 1970s they lowered the ceiling height by over 2 metres, in order to run the air-conditioning ducts along, above the new ceiling level. The aim of the project is twofold, one to regain the original height of the galleries from when Sir Richard Wallace was here and also to bring daylight into the galleries. We started on site in October 2010, there was of course all the stages leading up to that point, including the design and the planning. We are now at the stage in January 2012 of the silk being hung and the gilding in the galleries It is at this point where the project suddenly accelerates and in a month's time we will be completely finished. We look for craftsmen who are able to complete the finishes, keeping it true to how it would have been in Sir Richard Wallace's day. The gilding process has really remained the same. The small brush which applies the gold is called a tip. What we do is rub it in your hair to pick up static, to lift the gold leaf out of the book of gold. It's 23 1/4 carat, which is about as pure as you can use for this process. Once an area is laid then we will skew it off or tamp it off getting rid of all the loose gold and then polishing it. To gild each room will probably take about 5 days, depending on the manpower. You'll find that in most museums in the world that Dutch paintings are shown on a green background. We have decided to go for a colour that was used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a backdrop for Dutch paintings, quite often by major collectors, but which hasn't been used recently, as far as we know. We have used dark blue silk, woven in Lyon, for the galleries and it's a wonderful background in particular for the works of Rembrandt and his school, which will go into the first of the three galleries. It's a very difficult skill hanging silk such as this, we've got a vertical stripe in these galleries, and to make sure that is straight and even all the way through, is quite a skill. We've been doing several rooms here, this one will be the sixth one. We do smaller rooms in private houses and this one is a big gallery. One room will take approximately a week for three men. I think the difference with what we had in the East Galleries, compared to what we are about to open will be really extraordinary. There will be natural light coming in from the ceiling, which was very difficult to achieve as the light is not allowed to harm the artworks so it cannot hit them directly. The cornice that we have is actually the original cornice that they had in the time of Richard Wallace and, of course, was hidden when they dropped the ceiling level. The Wallace Collection has a small but very fine collection of Dutch paintings. Almost all of them will be shown in these three galleries. Titus will go into the first gallery in the East Wing. It's March and the installation of the works of art is complete and the galleries are now open to the public. In the three rooms one will experience a short history of Dutch seventeenth-century painting. They start with the first gallery, which is dedicated to Rembrandt and his circle. It also includes a display of Dutch landscape painting. Titus has been brought into the Dutch context of the first gallery, and he hangs opposite Rembrandt's self-portrait, so father and son face each other across the gallery. The second gallery is dedicated to Dutch genre paintings, topographical views, still-lifes and landscapes. The focus of the third gallery is Italy as a source of inspiration for Dutch painters, in terms of beautiful golden light and the landscape of the Roman Campagna. This provides a wonderful link into the Great Gallery with our display of international baroque paintings, with its centre in Rome. Most of the paintings on show here haven't actually been on view for 2 years during the rebuild and the refurbishment. So we are very happy to invite you to return to the Wallace Collection to see your favourite paintings again in this wonderful new context or to take the opportunity to come and see the Collection for the first time. We hope that the visitors will come in, rediscover the Dutch galleries and maybe they'll just say wow when they come in.