The Wallace collection is famed for its collection of priceless painting and antiques, but as war was declared in 1939, its home, Hertford House, was denuded of artworks including vast Boucher canvases, which were hurriedly ferried to safer locations in the countryside.
However, Hertford House — the former townhouse of the Seymour family, Marquesses of Hertford — didn’t remain empty throughout wartime. In 1942, it would be turned into a somewhat unlikely stage for two exhibitions that would trumpet Soviet Russia who, after being invaded by the Nazis, joined the Allied forces.
Having claimed the emptied Hertford House for wartime exhibitions, Britain’s Ministry of Works set about pivoting the space into something that would strengthen bonds between the new allies.
On 1 July 1942, the Artists Aid Russia exhibition opened (Agniya Maisky, wife of the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky had the honours), a kind of Summer-Exhibition-meets-Frieze-Art-Fair, in which the venue was densely packed with 904 works by British artists, including Augustus John and Jacob Epstein, with half the proceeds from sales of these artworks were directed to Clementine Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. Churchill herself purchased two paintings for the cause, namely L.D. Luard’s Up The Gallops and The White Boat by Augustus Lunn.
In November that year, a second, bolder exhibition was staged: 25 Years of Progress was an installation — designed by future Trellick Tower architect Ernő Goldfinger, no less — which filled the Wallace Collection with Hammer and Sickles banners, Soviet-style agitprop and oversized imagery of Joseph Stalin (in a holy triumvirate with Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt).
25 Years of Progress was a celebration of the expeditious growth of Russia, and a flash-in-the-pan salute to a country that would soon be denounced as a threat to the British, once the Second World War was over.
The Wallace Collection at War is a free display launching in April, which remembers 1942’s two exhibitions, with photographs of the galleries at that time, as well as imagery of the Blitz and of the art collection in its improvised country-house storage.
Some of the works originally from Artists Aid Russia will feature too, including Carel Weight’s It Happened to Us, a depiction of an air raid featuring a man scrambling to hide behind a London bus; Charles Murray’s spectral Russian Soldiers; and Ethel Gabain’s lithograph of women salvaging form the rubble.
Says Dr Alison Smith, Director of Collections and Research and curator of the display: “Even stripped of its treasures, Hertford House remained a place where ideas were exchanged and alliances reinforced. These remarkable exhibitions remind us that museums are not only custodians of art, they are civic spaces capable of shaping public understanding, especially at moments of profound national uncertainty.”
The Wallace Collection at War, 15 April-25 October 2026, free. For much of the run, this exhibition is accompanied by Winston Churchill: The Painter, 23 May-29 November 2026. Note, there’s an entrance fee for this exhibition.
