Vivienne Westwood on the Wallace Collection

Vivienne Westwood on how the Wallace Collection has influenced and inspired her career. Go to Creative Spaces to find out more. I think that the main thing about the Wallace Collection is the eighteenth century and how it demonstrates what a high point of culture and art it is. It’s the whole thing, the furniture and the snuff boxes. Everything in here is a treasure and it’s like you make this jewel box for the jewels. Oil painting is a means for rich people to demonstrate their wealth and so you get musical instruments, their castle in the background and they wanted to use the medium of oil painting to show how wonderful and powerful they were. This is Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, Boucher was Pompadour’s pet, She helped so many artists throughout her life that she left the longest will in history. She promoted the arts like no other women. My collection that was most inspired by the Wallace Collection, was a collection called Portrait. I wanted to use the things that most epitomised paintings. And for example, I chose pearl drop earrings because I decided that was the most typical jewellery throughout the century somehow. I designed a special hat that would look just as good as someone in 1930, 1830, 1730 a sort of little trilby type thing. I wanted canvas in my collection and even more I wanted an actual photographic painting and that is when I decided to choose the Boucher, as being so typical and so pretty. I had it printed on corsets. There are probably more Bouchers here under one roof then in any building in the world. It’s full of Boucher, he was very prolific, so facile that apparently he didn’t use models. It’s so light and, I don’t know, cynical, it’s brilliant. My manifesto is about culture and it’s against consumerism. And I believe that even to pursue art gives you this wonderful anchor, you can engage in politics, you can get a view of the world and you always feel like you’re making progress. Here we have Fragonard’s famous painting ’the Swing’. It’s a very highly finished Fragonard, sometimes he painted terribly sketchily and that actually is the mark of French eighteenth-century painting, it’s ever so sketchy. This is very iconic, the lady all totally in pink and it’s all about the fact that she’s not wearing any knickers and this man has got such a wonderful view right up her skirt. People in the eighteenth century would have known that immediately, we just think of it as pretty painting but its actually typical Fragonard. The next collection I did featured very much Sèvres porcelain and it’s all around you here. And I used these three wonderfully typical colours from Sèvres. For the turquoise colour I chose this teacup and saucer. For the Sèvres pink I chose the pattern on this pink tray here. For the blue I chose these fluted patterns. The way these flutes come down on the blue that obviously lends you the idea that this would look good on a dress, I’m just doing it now. It suggests that. When I work on collections in my studio in Battersea I have students doing work experience and I always send them here, that’s part of the work experience. Some of them haven’t been but then I make them discover this place. And I always say that the Wallace Collection is the greatest art school in this country and I tell them just remember when you go there that nobody today could make one thing that’s in there. Nobody today could paint even one little flower on Sèvres porcelain, it’s all lost. And I do believe that art is a mirror on life and that it gives us the depth of understanding how other people lived and I have been inspired by it my whole career.