30th January 2019

The Wallace Collection: Past, Present and Future
XAVIER BRAY director of the Wallace Collection, comes to supper.

30th January
(Drinks and canapés – followed by talk – followed by a two course dinner and questions)

We are delighted that Dr Xavier Bray has agreed to join us for supper and talk about the stunning and quite unique Wallace Collection. The Wallace Collection is an internationally renowned national museum based in the central London and contains unsurpassed masterpieces of paintings, sculpture, furniture, arms and armour, and porcelain. Built over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, it is one of the finest and most celebrated collections in the world. So that it could be kept together and enjoyed by generations of visitors, the collection was given to the British Nation in 1897. It was an astonishing bequest and one of the greatest gifts of art works ever to be transferred into public ownership.’

Dr Xavier Bray is an art historian specialising in Spanish art and sculpture and is currently the Director of the Wallace Collection, London. Formerly Chief Curator of Dulwich Picture Gallery and Assistant Curator of 17th and 18th-century European paintings at the National Gallery, London, he has curated several exhibitions including The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Sculpture and Painting 1600-1700 (2009) Goya: The Portraits (2015) and, most recently, Ribera: Art of Violence (2018). He completed his PhD in 1999 on Royal Religious Commissions as Political Propaganda in Spain under Charles III at Trinity College, Dublin.