Madam, - Mary Leland's article on the Daniel Maclise exhibition in Cork (Arts, October 21st) comments on the artist's ease at being both British and Irish at the same time.
Something similar might be said, though perhaps less convincingly, of Sir Richard Wallace - who, in 1879, made a gift of Maclise's massive painting The Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow to the then infant National Gallery of Ireland.
Wallace was then the sitting member for Lisburn in the House of Commons at Westminster - a seat he had, more or less, inherited along with the Hertford Estates, which included Lisburn and much of south Antrim, from his natural father, the Fourth Marquis of Hertford. He entered parliament at the by-election of 1873. He sat as a Tory, which meant unionist.
Seeking renomination, in 1880 he assured the electors of Lisburn that he was an unflinching opponent of those who sought the disintegration of the United Kingdom, as he was persuaded that Home Rule would be most disastrous for the prosperity of Ireland.
Wallace had also inherited from the Fourth Marquis that vast collection of art and artefacts that now constitute the Wallace Collection, a treasure which he had helped amass, as secretary to the Marquis. But the Maclise masterpiece he had bought himself. In fact he told the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, of which he had been appointed a member in 1878, that he had "long wished to become the purchaser of The Marriage of Strongbow with a view of presenting it to the National Gallery of Ireland. I have always felt that this masterly painting of our great Irish artist ought to find a permanent home on Irish soil".
Although a member of the board of the National Gallery for a decade, it seems he never actually managed to attend a board meeting. He was, for Lisburn, an absentee landlord, though a very generous one. He never took up residence, but left several monuments to his generosity - the Wallace Park, the Wallace High School and the recently restored Castle Gardens, where the Wallace Memorial is sited.
As to his Irishness, he had difficulty enough trying to be English. One contemporary described the Member for Lisburn as "French, not English". Raised and educated in France - he was French-speaking and spoke English with a French accent - he returned to France in later life, to live and die in his beloved Bagatelle, the Hertford residence in the Bois de Boulogne.
His monument there is not so much the beautifully restored and maintained Bagatelle and its gardens - open to the public - nor the nearby Boulevard Richard Wallace, but the ornate drinking fountains he had designed and installed throughout Paris after the siege of 1870, when the public water supply was destroyed. A considerable number of these - Les Wallaces - survive in the streets of Paris, and there are three in Lisburn.
Perhaps even more pleasing to Sir Richard, his name survives in the French language - to the Parisien, un wallace is a drinking fountain. - Yours, etc,
DENNIS KENNEDY,
Belfast 7.