Visiting the Wallace Collection, just behind Oxford Street, is always a thrill. It has the allure of a private house, with exuberant displays hung on silk-lined walls and arranged on mahogany furniture as if they were still the personal collection of the Marquesses of Hertford. Nothing is ever loaned, nothing ever acquired, but that's not to damn the place as held in aspic. It is determinedly dynamic: Elton John is a former trustee, and Vivienne Westwood, a devotee of its rococo glories, opened its new "Seductive Visions" exhibition. This show has been drawn wholly from the Wallace's supreme array of works by Francois Boucher, and is as dreamily lavish as a bath of double cream.
Feeling suitably elegant, I stroll up to Regent's Park to take tea with John Ritblat, whose company, British Land, is the sole sponsor of "Seductive Visions", and who is taking over as chairman of the Wallace Collection in January. I wait for him in an office overlooking the park. It is decorated with two large Italian Renaissance portraits of young girls and a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck or his school. Ritblat is nothing if not a connoisseur, though he denies that his artistic eye is anything like that of the Marquesses of Hertford or Henry Frick, whose New York home is often equated with the Wallace.
"My own collection is not a dedicated collection. I don't have a shopping list, like Frick did. I started with Books of Hours and medieval manuscripts. Then I moved on to impressionism. Well, we all go through that phase, don't we? Manet and Monet. And then I thought, well, I quite like the 17th and 18th century. So I started plunging into that. Then I got into English portraiture. I thought I should have some Romneys and Ramsays and Gainsboroughs. It's a very nice period."
Even though he is worth several million, Ritblat is one of those people whose demeanour is inclusive. He greets you as if you are an old friend, and talks as if you would probably have joined him in collecting Books of Hours and canvases by Manet had you only been around at the time.
His involvement with the Wallace began when he gave £100,000 to its new Conservation Gallery, but he thinks it might have been because his mother took him there when he was a boy. That is not to say Ritblat is vague; on the contrary, he is rather shrewd. He supports institutions ranging from the British Museum to the National Literacy Trust, as well as Barnardo's National Chess Week. "I find it entertaining," says Ritblat. "I like the institutions we support. I like the Royal Academy of Music, British skiing, the London Business School. I am mad on children going round exhibitions. But I do things for the future. I don't want to support things the government should be doing. I am not going to give money to hospitals. I am not going to provide cash so the V&A can have a new roof."
He relishes the beribboned glamour of Boucher's art. "It was designed to please, to entertain and to provide the background for a carefree existence," he says. Ritblat could assign those very characteristics to his policy for public support. His financial muscle has come from heavy construction, but he throws his "one-rs", as he calls them, firmly into the pot marked Good Life.
"Boucher: seductive visions" is at the Wallace Collection, London W1 (020 7887 8998) until 17 April 2005
