From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
A recent book about the late, great townhouses of London by the architectural historian Steven Brindle gets off to a curious start by containing a foreword by the current Duke of Wellington. He acknowledges the irony of his contribution, since he lives in one of the few houses of its type still standing: ‘Apsley House is in this book not because it is lost, but because its survival is unusual, if not unique.’
Apsley House, the London home of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and his descendants, may not be among the casualties recorded in London’s Lost Interiors, but it is far from well-known, even by Londoners. If an imposing stone-clad mansion standing on the south-east corner of Hyde Park, right next to its main gates, can be described as a hidden gem, then Apsley House is also hiding in plain sight. Where once it was the first – but far from the grandest – in a line of great houses stretching from the beginning of Park Lane along Piccadilly, since the early 1960s when Park Lane was widened and diverted to Hyde Park Corner, it has stood alone.
The extent to which a museum or institution is undersung is often overstated, but Apsley House may be an exception yet again. On what feels like the first bright morning of the year – it is late February – the first question Charles Wellesley, 9th Duke of Wellington asks me is, ‘Have you ever been here before?’ I am relieved to be able to say yes – although only once under my own steam (and well over a decade ago), so I came by a second time a few weeks before the interview to refresh my memory.
Thomas Lawrence’s c. 1665 portrait of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington hangs at the other end of the Piccadilly Drawing Room. Photo: Jasper Fry
The reason I am here now is an exhibition of Dutch pictures from the collection that opens this month in the Piccadilly Drawing Room. ‘Wellington’s Dutch Masterpieces’, curated by Teresa Posada Kubissa, formerly head of Dutch and Flemish painting at the Prado, presents around 20 of what she regards as the best works of their kind. The Spanish connection might reasonably suggest a Spanish provenance for these paintings. The bulk of the Iron Duke’s art collection came, after all, from a lucky find after the Battle of Vitoria in June 1813, when more than 200 paintings (along with books, engravings and manuscripts) were discovered among the defeated Joseph Bonaparte’s baggage train. Wellington wrote of this haul, which he sent to London while ascertaining its origins, ‘I believe I was born with Fortunatus’ cap on my head.’ But it was not until 1816 that Ferdinand VII of Spain made him a gift of the works from Spanish collections that Napoleon’s brother had tried to cart off to France.
Although there are Dutch paintings in a gift most notable for four masterpieces by Velázquez and a Correggio that Benjamin West thought should be framed in diamonds, these are not the works that will feature in the exhibition. The stars of this particular show are the pictures Wellington bought for himself in the years after Waterloo, when he was required to live in Paris as head of a multinational occupying army of 150,000 men. As sales of collections formed before the Revolution picked up in peacetime, Wellington bought heavily – not just paintings, but also French furniture and porcelain from the Sèvres factory. His tastes when it came to pictures, however, did not run to the Ancien Régime, but to more democratic Dutch genre scenes and landscapes – a taste he shared with other notable British collectors of the period such as the 3rd Marquess of Hertford and George IV. Acting as the Duke’s agent, the painter-turned-restorer-turned-dealer Féréol Bonnemaison bought at the La Peyrière and Le Rouge sales in April 1817 and April 1818 respectively works by the likes of Nicolaes Maes, Pieter de Hooch and Jan Steen, for which he paid top prices.
The Intruder: A Lady Surprised at her Toilet (c. 1665), Pieter de Hooch. The Wellington Collection, Apsley House (English Heritage), London. Photo: © Historic England Archive
Two impulses are at work in the decision to draw attention to these paintings for the first time. The current duke is the author of Wellington Portrayed (2014), a book about the depictions of his ancestor, who in the 19th century was probably the most painted person ‘other than a king or a queen in British history’. In recent years, he has been thinking about Wellington as a collector of art, as well as a subject, and tells me about Richard Ford, who visited Apsley House for the Illustrated London News just after the death of the first Duke and described him as ‘no judge of fine art’. Not so, says Charles Wellesley, citing as evidence an incident after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, when Wellington passed through the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso in Segovia and paid such close attention to the paintings there that the intendant of the province later sent him 12 pictures.
‘I suppose only in the last 10 or 20 years have I come to realise how much he actually bought himself,’ says the Duke. By the time of his death, Wellington owned about 500 paintings and the point is, ‘he bought quite well’. This was brought home to him by the Nicolaes Maes exhibition organised by the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the National Gallery in London, which borrowed Apsley House’s version of The Eavesdropper and put it on the cover of the catalogue. The National Gallery planted another seed in the form of its focused one-room displays of a single painting or pair of paintings with accompanying drawings or studies for context (think of Parmigianino’s Vision of Saint Jerome or Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès). ‘Wellington’s Dutch Masterpieces’ is a larger-scale attempt to do the same thing – to make overlooked works more prominent and to create new contexts for them.
The Eavesdropper (c. 1655–56), Nicolaes Maes. The Wellington Collection, Apsley House (English Heritage), London. Photo: Historic England Archive
The same principle of gentle profile-raising can be seen in the management of Apsley House as a whole. The reason this hidden gem is still standing is because the 7th Duke gave the house to the nation in 1947. The Wellington Museum Act gave the maintenance of Apsley House to the Ministry of Works while the Ministry of Education – in practice the Victoria and Albert Museum, which belonged to the department until 1984 – was to run ‘The Wellington Museum’ and the family retained the right to live in the private apartments. What is open to the public now are the public reception rooms Wellington created for receiving visitors from all over Europe and for holding the Waterloo Banquet, an annual affair until his death in 1852. The 7th Duke was a diplomat, architect and soldier and, from 1936–43, he had been Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (‘not a professional’, his grandson says, ‘but he was a knowledgeable art historian’). As the sales and demolitions of the great townhouses, which began in the 1920s and ’30s, accelerated after the Second World War, ‘he just couldn’t bear to do what everybody else was doing, i.e. to sell the house and break up the collection’. There’s some irony in the fact that a capital that wasn’t the centre of a revolution got rid of its aristocratic townhouses, while there is no shortage of hôtels particuliers in Paris. But, as the Duke puts it, ‘Taxation is much more destructive than revolution.’
The arrangement with the V&A was not an entirely happy one, even though major refurbishments were undertaken during its period of management. The Duke says, ‘I know many people who were trustees of the V&A during that period and Apsley House was never ever discussed. It simply wasn’t important to them.’ A brief glance at the diaries of Roy Strong, director of the V&A between 1974 and 1987, doesn’t contradict this view. Strong mentions trustees’ meetings taking place at Apsley House, but there’s no indication that it was on the agenda. He also admits that he got off to a bad start with the family ‘when I allowed the Byron Society in for a glass of sherry’ (after laying wreaths at the poet’s statue, which stands nearby) and received a long letter from the 8th Duke ‘saying how his ancestor, the first Duke, had not approved of Byron’.
Since 2004, the house has been managed by English Heritage – not a move that seems to have been welcomed by the family at the time, judging by the newspaper reports, but the relationship is now a good one. A ‘little committee’, of which the Duke is a member, manages the house in a ‘less institutional’ way. ‘What I have tried to do for the last 30 years is to make it feel like a lived-in historic house. We’ve done all sorts of things, we’ve lent furniture, we’ve put some more family portraits up, we completely redecorated the hall, we’ve put picture lights everywhere, to make it feel less like just a soulless gallery.’
From a visitor’s point of view, it is hard to think of a house that contains Canova’s nearly three-and-a-half-metre-high nude statue of Napoleon in the hallway as soulless. If you have never been to Apsley House, this alone would be reason to visit. (By the time Canova had completed the statue, the emperor – who had commissioned it in 1802 and saw it in Paris in 1811, regarded the work as ‘trop athlétique’. It was consigned to a corner of the Louvre until a grateful British nation bought it for 66,000 francs and presented it to Wellington in 1816.)
The statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker (1802–06) by Antonio Canova stands in the stairwell of Apsley House. Photo: Jasper Fry
In 1973, Apollo devoted the best part of an issue to Apsley House. The editorial by Denys Sutton found hope in the figure of Wellington while striking a note of gloom: ‘his humour, courage and belief in country are inspiring, not least at the present time, when Empire has vanished and our fortunes have waned’. (Sutton was still full of melancholy about England in 1975 when he devoted an issue to Wellington’s country house at Stratfield Saye.)
That was then. As for now, it is inspiring enough to find that there are so many exceptional works of art, including some exceptional Dutch Old Masters, in a historic house that has been so carefully restored and looked after.
‘Wellington’s Dutch Masterpieces’ is at Apsley House, London, from 2 April.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.