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Ninety seconds on Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection is open every day from 10.00 to 17.00 and closes on 24, 25 and 26 December each year. The courtyard restaurant serves during the same hours, with last orders at 16.30.
Yes. Entry to the permanent collection is free and unticketed, so there is no need to book. Temporary exhibitions need a ticket, with concessions for disabled visitors and free tickets for carers.
Bond Street station, on the Central, Jubilee and Elizabeth lines, is a seven-minute walk from the museum. Bond Street has step-free access by lift at its Marylebone Lane entrance.
It is known for 18th-century French paintings and decorative arts, for Fragonard's The Swing and for Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier. It also holds one of Britain's finest collections of princely arms and armour, and oil paintings spanning the 14th to the late 19th century.
Yes. A free Collection Highlights Tour runs every day from 14.30 to 15.30. Places are limited and allocated first come, first served on the day, reserved in person at the entrance desk.
About an hour and a half covers the two famous paintings, the Old Masters and the armouries without hurrying. A meal in the courtyard restaurant or a temporary exhibition adds to that.
Fragonard's The Swing and Hals's The Laughing Cavalier hang here, free to see, beside princely arms and armour, in a private collection left to the nation in 1897.
Lady Wallace, Sir Richard Wallace's widow, left the collection to the nation, and it opened as a museum in 1900. Its strength is French paintings and decorative arts of the 18th century, hung with Old Masters by Titian, Velázquez, Rubens and Van Dyck.
Fragonard's The Swing and Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier are the two famous pictures. Look also for Velázquez's The Lady with a Fan, Rembrandt's Titus, the Artist's Son and two Canaletto views of Venice.
The armouries rank among Britain's best princely collections. Find the armour for a man and horse made in Landshut around 1480, a jewelled dagger of about 1615 and a pair of flintlock pistols that belonged to Louis XIV.
Dropping coats and bags in the free visitor lockers comes first. Then start with the paintings: The Swing and The Laughing Cavalier first, then the Old Masters by Titian and Rubens.
For audio on the highlights, connect to the museum's free wi-fi and scan the QR codes beside the works, or use the Look-Up numbers in the Bloomberg Connects app.
Finish with a meal in the glazed courtyard restaurant, which takes walk-ins.
Pair it with Soho, or with the National Gallery for more painting the same day.
The armouries are usually the quietest part of the museum, so go there when the painting rooms are busy.
Rooms can close at short notice. Ask at the front desk on arrival about any gallery you have come to see.
The museum has no visitor parking, and street parking around it is metered until 18.30.
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