This show is best enjoyed as a portal to the armour galleries, sending you to see the sallets and beavers that gave so many movie soldiers their look. Not only did its curator advise on The Lost King, but when Laurence Olivier was filming Richard III, he came here to study a mannequin in plate armour on a rearing horse. Wall texts summarise the Richard hoo-hah and show how his representation on screen has long been influenced by the Wallace Collection’s excellent collection of armour. It juxtaposes Delaroche with a suit of armour made for the movie, whose accuracy it extolls, in contrast to the supposed Shakepearean chicanery of Delaroche. The Wallace Collection misses a trick – and a shot of human empathy – in putting metaphorical question marks around this painting, and telling us that a film that may soon be forgotten is a more truthful, serious representation of the past than this jewel of Romantic art. That’s exactly what Delaroche shows in his painting. Argentine told Mancini they were paralysed with fear, saying their prayers in expectation of imminent death. He spoke to Edward V’s doctor, John Argentine – possibly the last person except for their killers to see them alive. Strong suspicions were aired at the time, and recorded by the Italian traveller and writer Domenico Mancini, who was in Britain when the princes vanished.

For it is not true that the story of Richard III murdering his nephews was made up by Tudor propagandists. It also happens to be faithful to the earliest extant source on the mystery of the princes in the tower. Here are two innocents, imprisoned and expecting to be murdered. Painted in 1831 and long owned by the Wallace Collection, this little freeze-frame of fear should speak to our age. Photograph: Cassandra Parsons/© The Wallace Collection Thus it places a big sceptical question mark over the painting at its heart, while presenting prop armour used in the film as the last word in factual reconstruction.Īrmour at the The Lost King exhibition. That’s what this exhibition, a tie-in with the new Steve Coogan film The Lost King, also seems to take for granted. This has inspired an apparently universal assumption that Richard was a Good King, even though his skeleton provides no evidence about his deeds in life. The same age that witnessed Brexit also saw the rehabilitation of Richard III after his skeleton was discovered under a Leicester car park in 2012. The Wallace Collection in London is the last place I expected to encounter what amounts to a kind of historical populism. Interpretations change, and the current vogue for seeing Richard III, so long portrayed as a tyrant, as a nice guy who somehow lost track of his nephews’ whereabouts, just as he was having himself crowned in young Edward V’s place, may one day seem silly. I t’s always unwise to assume today’s history is better than yesterday’s.

King richard iii laurence olivier