Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet

Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet (21 June 1818 – 20 July 1890), of Sudbourne Hall in Suffolk, Hertford House in London, Antrim Castle in the north of Ireland, and 2 Rue Laffitte and Château de Bagatelle, Paris, was a British aristocrat, art collector and Francophile.

[4] Later in life, after 1870 during his court case concerning his contested inheritance from the 4th Marquess, Richard declined the opportunity to put his origins on public record, stating merely that "he had been brought from London to Paris in 1825 aged 7 with his nurse".

[8] Long after her death Wallace erected a monument to Mie-Mie in Sudbourne Church (the only one there to a Hertford in 120 years of residence)[9] in the form of the stained-glass east window depicting Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who washed Jesus's feet with oil but was also the first person to witness the Resurrection, which Fairweather (2021) suspected to be "an intentional reference to Mie-Mie's circumstances".

Most of his youth and early manhood were spent in Paris, "where as Monsieur Richard he became a well-known figure in French society and among those who devoted themselves to matters of art".

[13] When Wallace visited it for the first time after his inheritance, accompanied by his wife and son, he was greeted by a crowd of 20,000 people and was welcomed in an elaborate series of ceremonies by the chief citizens.

[11] Even though at that time Lisburn was no longer the pocket borough it had been under the Hertford family before the Reform Act of 1832, Wallace was invited to stand as its Member of Parliament, and being unopposed, won the seat and so began his parliamentary career.

The Wallace Memorial comprises a 40 foot high stone and marble "square-plan tower with a steep crocketed spire topped with a poppy head finial, the front gable bearing a date and coat of arms, niches on each façade, one bearing a bust of the subject above an inscribed tablet, and on a three-stepped octagonal base".

[16] It was a notable sporting estate of about 12,000 acres (49 km2),[8] which became his English country seat[17] and where he held lavish shooting parties, guests at which included the Prince of Wales.

He commissioned three large oil paintings by the French artist Alfred Charles Ferdinand Decaen, depicting his shooting parties (On Sudbourne Hill (1874); Shooting Luncheon at the Great Wood Sudbourne (1876); Battue de perdreaux dans la comté de Suffolk (1880)), now displayed in Orford Town Hall.

[25] After Wallace's death it was eventually inherited by his secretary Sir John Murray Scott, during whose ownership the house and contents are described by Vita Sackville-West in Pepita, her biography of her mother Lady Sackville (Scott's mistress), who ultimately inherited the contents, which she sold in 1914 to the dealer Jacques Seligmann[26] for £270,000[27] (£35 million in 2022) and of which the Wallace Collection was therefore deprived:[28] This estate came to the Hertfords via Mie-Mie, wife of the 3rd Marquess and illegitimate daughter of the 4th Duke of Queensbury.

The Bury and Norwich Post reported on 3 January 1882: "It is stated that Sir Richard Wallace has decided upon laying out and cutting up his Queensberry Estate, at Newmarket, for building purposes.

[30] On 15 February 1871, six months after the death of the 4th Marquess and having received his paternal inheritance, he married his long-term mistress Amélie Julie Charlotte Castelnau (1819–1897), known as Amélie,[32] whom he had met in his youth when she was working as a dressmaker or sales-assistant in a perfume shop,[2] an illegitimate daughter of Bernard Castelnau, said by some sources to have been "a French officer" [4] and by others "a 36-year-old homme de confiance (factotum)" with her mother being an "ouvrière en linge (linen maid)".

[2] Amélie was not the ideal wife for Wallace in his new station in life[34] as a famous millionaire socialite and art-collector as she spoke no English, and refused to do so, did not enjoy social events and with little interest in fine art was said to have unrefined taste.

By Amélie he had, before the marriage, one son, which made him permanently illegitimate under English law (but not under French law) and therefore unable to inherit the baronetcy: Following the refusal of Queen Victoria to allow him a special remainder for his baronetcy to descend to his illegitimate son, and the estrangement of the latter in 1879 and the latter's death in 1887, Wallace's dream of creating his own English dynasty crumbled, and he returned to France to live in retirement at the Bagatelle.

He attempted to plan the donation of his Collection to the British government, but his poor health and decreasing interest in business matters led to no progress.

[11] Wallace expanded the art collection built by his grandfather and father, the 3rd and 4th Marquesses of Hertford, mainly with additions of mediaeval and Renaissance objects and European arms and armour.

[42] The Collection is now located in Hertford House in Manchester Square, London, Wallace's townhouse, which the Government purchased from Sir John Murray Scott.

At his own expense, Wallace organized two full scale ambulances[43] to operate during the siege; one to serve French wounded, and the second for the benefit of sick and destitute Britons.

He died unexpectedly at the Chateau de Bagatelle[2] on 20 July 1890 and was buried in the Hertford family's mausoleum in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.