The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN.
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Three collectors led the 1932 foundation of The Courtauld Institute of Art as an academic centre devoted to the serious study of the history of art: the well-connected diplomat Viscount Lee of Fareham, the art historian and lawyer Sir Robert Witt, and the helpfully rich textile magnate Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947), who gifted his Robert Adam-designed townhouse in Portman Square with its dazzling impressionist and post-impressionist collection. Whatever one might make of his more notorious actions, Sir Anthony Blunt – the director from 1947 to 1974 – helped establish the Institute’s reputation as an international leader in research.
Since 2002, it has been an independent college of the University of London. The gallery’s move to the Strand block of Somerset House in 1989 enabled the collection to be better shown, and a 2021 remodelling updated it. That, opined Rowan Moore in The Guardian, showed ‘how you can spend tens of millions without anyone much noticing’, and a second phase – to rehouse the students and staff alongside the gallery – is still to happen. All the same, the result is a top quality spaces in which to show not just the expected out-and-out masterworks by Botticelli, Gaugin, Manet, van Gogh, Seurat etc., but also drawings rotated from the collection, and two-room temporary exhibitions. You can currently catch a superb display of Frank Auerbach’s drawings with the serious effort of paintings (to 27 May). Return in the autumn (27 Sept – 19 Jan), and you will see a survey of Monet’s production over his three London visits between 1899-1901, with views of the Thames shown a pebble-skim from where they were painted.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
