He was ‘the great World-victor’s victor’, a brilliant general, a bad marksman and a worse Prime Minister, but Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was also a sophisticated collector.
As well as owning works by Correggio and Velázquez and his portraits by Francisco Goya and Sir Thomas Lawrence, he had a passion for Dutch art and Apsley House, his London home, will rehang those remarkable paintings as a single group from April 2 to Christmas this year.
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- In 1817–18, a mere few years after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, the Duke bought 21 Dutch artworks in Paris: nine came from the collection of a French financier, 12 from a dealer who was selling off his stock ahead of retirement
- His most expensive purchase at that time was Jan Steen’s 1667 drunken revelry, The Wedding Party, which cost him £472 — still rather short of the £1,260 he paid in 1822 for Sir David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch
- Although the Duke did employ agents for his Dutch acquisitions, he chose the paintings himself. He had a particular interest in genre scenes, but also bought landscapes and townscapes
- As well as The Wedding Party, other highlights of the collection include The Musical Party by Pieter de Hooch, The Eavesdropper by Nicolaes Maes and another picture by Steen, The Egg Dance
- The quality of the pictures was such that they were in demand for the British Institution’s annual exhibitions