Wallace Collection the largest, most important and extant collection of French 18th-century decorative arts in the world, rivalled only by the triumvirate of the Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles and Mobilier National in France. The Wallace Collection is a non-departmental public body and admission is free. The Wallace Collection is a museum which displays the works of art collected in the 18th and 19th centuries by five generations of a British aristocratic family – the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess. In the 19th century, the Marquesses of Hertford were one
Blanton Museum of Art by a group of portraits bequeathed by Jack G. Taylor, including George Romney's "Lady Hamilton" (1791). The Blanton owns a collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman vases, the earliest of which date to the sixth century BCE. Many came from the Castle Ashby Collection formed by the Spencer Compton, 2nd Marquess of Northampton, who funded numerous excavations at Vulci, an Etruscan town north of Rome, during the 1820s. The Blanton's modern and contemporary art holdings comprise more than 4,000 objects. Novelist James Michener, and his wife, Mari Michener, began giving their collection of 20th-century American paintings to the Blanton in