Okay, listen. There are paintings in this show by Picasso, Cézanne, Degas, Matisse, Van Dyck, Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Manet, Rembrandt, Poussin, Titian and someone who Sir Joshua Reynolds thought was Mantegna but was actually Bellini. As a starting line-up, that’s not bad in anyone’s book. What links all these works is that they were once the property of another famous artist, and there are some really really great things here, from Constable’s heartbreakingly fresh ‘Portrait of Laura Moubray’, which once hung in Lucian Freud’s lounge (or whatever he called it), to a huge preparatory fresco study by Caracci, once owned by fash Regency portraitist Thomas Lawrence. If you like Ingres, you’re in luck: Degas lurrvved him and bought loads of his works.
But knowing that someone once owned something doesn’t necessarily invest it with extra significance, and ‘Painters’ Paintings’ is more frustrating than revealing. Overwhelmed by two large rooms of Degas’s collection, the works owned by the other artists feel sidelined. There are fun details but not many surprises, though I like the fact that Reynolds flogged a nasty painting by Gainsborough of a gamine urchin tending some pigs for three times what he paid for it. Like him, you get plenty of bang for your buck here, but if you want real value for money, just spend an hour or four in the National Gallery upstairs. It’ll cost you nothing.