Interview with Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection

1. Xavier Bray, directeur de la Wallace Collection
Photo : Wallace Collection

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Xavier Bray (ill. 1) has been Director of the Wallace Collection since 2016. We caught up with him in London to talk about his seven years at the helm of one of England’s most prestigious museums - which, as we wrote here, can now lend to exhibitions - and his plans for the future.

Who runs the Wallace Collection today, and how is it funded?

As a national museum, The Wallace Collection is state funded, and like the National Gallery or the Victoria & Albert Museum, for example, we are dependent on the government, more specifically the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. We receive three million pounds a year, and the rest we have to find ourselves. To stay open, we need at least £7.6 million a year, which means we have to find £4.6 million every year. This explains why we depend so much on events, and now on exhibitions, which are now subject to a charge, as the rest of the museum is free. The current exhibition on dog portraits (Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney), for example, is doing quite well.
Otherwise, to survive, we have the restaurant, and we have patrons. It’s not easy, we’re barely managing, and it was even more difficult during Covid. We had to use up the reserves we’d built up over the last twenty years, because the crisis led to a sizeable deficit. In 2021, we had two exhibitions Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes and Frans Hals: The Male Portrait, which were digitally captured and can be viewed here. And fortunately, the Disney exhibition (Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts), a collaboration with the Met, helped us a great deal, as did the dog exhibition.

Didn’t Richard Wallace leave any money for an endowment fund?

No. Wallace died in 1890. The bequest came from his wife, Lady Wallace, Amélie - she was French. It was she who made the bequest to the British nation in 1897, but with a number of conditions: to build a new museum in the centre of London, to have the main staircase, whose balustrade originally came from the Hôtel de Nevers, the former Royal Bank, right in the middle of the museum, and to ensure that the collection stayed together and was not mixed with other works. She never said we couldn’t lend.

Was this clause added afterwards?

No, it became a de facto situation. It says in the bequest: "The collection must always be kept together unmixed with other objects of art". "Kept together" was interpreted as meaning that nothing could be taken out. So there was no need for a judgement in order to lend. Nor did I really need the government’s permission, just its support. I only had to point out that Sir Richard and Lady Wallace had been avid lenders during their lifetime, and were very generous in that respect, and I showed that for a museum today, and in the interests of the collection, it was necessary to participate in the cultural scene, and…