Wallace Collection of the wealthiest families in Europe. They owned large properties in England, Wales and Ireland, and increased their wealth through successful marriages. Politically of lesser importance, the 3rd and 4th Marquess and Sir Richard Wallace became leading art collectors of their time. The Wallace Collection, comprising about 5,500 works of art, was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897. The state then decided to buy Hertford House to display the collection and it was opened as a museum in 1900. As a museum the Wallace Collection's main strength is perhaps its extraordinary array of 18th-century French art:
Huntington Hartford 2009 for $33 million, a world record for a Rembrandt. To house his extensive collection of 19th- and 20th-century art, Hartford built the Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan which opened in 1964. Pointedly, it did not include Abstract Expressionism which Hartford panned in his book, "Art or Anarchy". Hartford was a patron of the architect Edward Durell Stone who designed the modernist marble-clad structure often derided as the "lollipop building". Stone had previously designed the Museum of Modern Art for the Rockefeller family. Hartford commissioned Salvador Dalí to paint The Discovery of America by Christopher