If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the French pictures. They are the _pièce de résistance_ of the Wallace Collection, gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their lives there. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection is almost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess of Hertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds to paint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of the collection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” and the Romney “Perdita.” His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric career enlivened the first half of the last century--the original of both Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whose wealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many a year. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’s Park, and he filled it with _objets d’art_ of all kinds, and a number of pictures, chiefly of the Dutch school. His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent his life in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collection that is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French art expert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account of his curious life in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for September 1900, but it is not possible to give the details now. Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name is legendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, for every thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountains he put all over the city “un Vallace.” M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressed in the dedication of his _Le Siège de Paris_ something of the feeling Parisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing their perils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts. Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the Hertford Collection to France. He had always shared his father’s passion for collecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot, Rousseau’s lovely _Forest Glade_, and the enchanting fresco on plaster of a _Boy Reading_ by the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works he bought. To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’s work (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there are eight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The Music Lesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.” I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else; not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but because his work may be better studied here than in his own country.