A few streets from Marble Arch, an ordinary-looking townhouse holds watercolours and Old Masters of national importance — and, by a quirk of the tax code, you can knock and be let in.
Walk north from the roar of the Marylebone Road and the city quietens by degrees. By the time you reach Wyndham Place, with the Greek Revival portico of St Mary's church closing the vista, you are in one of those pockets of London that seem to have mislaid the present century. There is no brass plaque, no ticket desk, no queue. Yet behind the front door of number 14 hangs a collection that any provincial museum would mortgage its roof to borrow: a celebrated group of watercolours by John Frederick Lewis, landscapes by Richard Wilson, and a cabinet of Italian and French pictures running from Pannini to Ingres.
This is the Ford Collection, and the reason a member of the public can see it at all is one of the more romantic provisions in British fiscal law.
Works of art judged "pre-eminent" can be granted conditional exemption from inheritance tax. The deferral is not a gift: in exchange, the owner must keep the object in the country, look after it, and allow the public reasonable access to see it. The bargain has populated a public register with treasures that remain in private hands, scattered through country houses and, more rarely, a London terrace.
The register lists three entries at this single address. They read, in the dry prose of the schedule, like a connoisseur's wish-list:
It is an extraordinary thing to find behind a residential door — and the explanation lies not in a dealer's eye but in three centuries of a single family's enthusiasms.
The house was the home of the late Sir Brinsley Ford (1908–1999), one of the most distinguished connoisseurs of his age. Ford chaired the National Art Collections Fund — today the Art Fund — from 1975 to 1980, years in which the charity helped save scores of works for the nation. He was a scholar as much as a buyer: his monograph The Drawings of Richard Wilson, published in 1951, remains a landmark in the literature.
That scholarship was no accident of taste. The Wilson holdings descend, in part, from the eighteenth-century collector Benjamin Booth, an ancestor who acquired the painter's English landscapes when Wilson was still alive — so that the man who wrote the standard work on Wilson's drawings had grown up among Wilsons that had scarcely left the family since they were painted.
The other great strand of the collection sails in from Spain. Ford was a descendant of Richard Ford (1796–1858), author of the magnificent, opinionated Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845). Richard Ford lived in Spain from 1830 to 1833, with Seville as his base, and there he housed and patronised the young John Frederick Lewis. The Lewis watercolours of Seville now on the register are, in effect, the souvenirs of that friendship, kept in the family for the better part of two centuries.
To stand in front of them is to collapse the distance between a Sevillian courtyard of the 1830s and a Marylebone sitting room — the same pictures, the same family, the intervening generations simply folded away.
To these inherited treasures Sir Brinsley added his own loves, chiefly the Italian seicento and settecento — hence the Cozza, the Conca, the Pannini and the rest, and the single line of an Ingres sitting quietly among them.
What makes a visit memorable is precisely that the pictures have never been institutionalised. This is a lived-in house, not a gallery pretending to be one; the works hang where a family chose to live with them, in the light of ordinary London windows. The pictures have travelled out on occasion — loans have gone to public exhibitions including Dulwich Picture Gallery, and in 2014 an Art Fund-supported show, Grand Collecting: Richard Wilson and Masterworks from the Ford Collection, set the family's holdings before a wider audience — but their natural home is here, behind the door on Wyndham Place.
Access is the price of the tax exemption, and it is genuine. As listed on the public register, the collection may be seen by guided tour on set days — historically around 28 days a year, spread across spring, summer and autumn and including bank holidays — and otherwise by appointment. A modest charge per person applies. Be warned that this is a real house: there are around 21 steps and no lift.
As listed on the public register, bookings are made through Mr Francis Ford. These arrangements are set by the owners and can change, so confirm the current details — and the published access days — before setting out. You can find all three Wyndham Place entries here, each with the contact and a ready-drafted request.
It is a peculiarly English pleasure: to ring a doorbell on a quiet square and be shown, by the family that owns them, watercolours and Old Masters that belong, in every sense but the legal one, to all of us.
In association with Irving Scott
From house managers to estate teams, Irving Scott staffs the households behind Britain's finest private collections — with discretion and an eye for the right fit.