The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN
This monumental balustrade, executed for the Royal Bank of France in the early years of Louis XV’s reign, is both an outstanding example of French decorative ironwork and a rare survival of a scheme closely bound to the ambitious yet short-lived financial reforms of John Law (1671–1729). A Scottish economist who rose to extraordinary influence at the French court, Law established the Royal Bank in 1718 and promoted paper money and joint-stock ventures as a means of stimulating economic growth. His vision gave rise to the so-called Mississippi Company and to one of the most notorious financial bubbles of the eighteenth century.
The balustrade reflects this charged context. Its scrolling ironwork, enriched with delicately cast motifs of coins, trailing foliage, and fruit, proclaimed prosperity and abundance while discreetly celebrating the new monetary system. At its centre, a large cartouche entwines the double “L” monogram of Louis XV, underscoring both royal sanction and the aura of stability that Law sought to associate with his innovations. Yet the optimism it embodied proved fleeting. In 1720 the system collapsed, Law fell from power and into exile, and the balustrade, once a symbol of confidence, was soon stripped of its function and left to neglect.
Its subsequent history is fragmentary until the nineteenth century, when it resurfaced on the Parisian art market. In 1871 it was acquired by Sir Richard Wallace, who valued it as both a work of craftsmanship and a tangible witness to one of the defining financial dramas of ancien-régime France. Installed at Hertford House, it forms the grand ascent to the upper galleries, in deliberate dialogue with the large canvases by François Boucher that hang nearby, including The Rising of the Sun and The Setting of the Sun, originally painted for Madame de Pompadour, as well as mythological subjects such as Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs and The Rape of Europa.
Lady Wallace’s bequest of 1897 guaranteed that the Collection would remain intact, with no permanent additions or dispersals, and would be free to the public. The balustrade, together with the Boucher canvases, thus preserves not only the splendour of eighteenth-century French art and decorative design but also the memory of a brief moment when finance, monarchy, and artistic patronage converged in a vision of modern prosperity that ended in spectacular collapse.