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Edouard Manet, 'Bar at the Folies-Bergère'
Copyright the Samuel Courtauld Collection
There are some paintings that just seem to hit you, like they’re reaching out of the canvas and just thumping you in the chest, properly and physically. You walk into the room and – bam! – you’re floored, winded, overwhelmed by what you’re seeing. The Courtauld Gallery has more of those works than it has any right to.
When you stumble on Edouard Manet’s incredible, gorgeous ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ it feels like a book has come to life; this work that you’ve seen reproduced countless times is suddenly real, it’s right there in front of you. It’s magical. And then there’s Auguste Renoir’s ‘La Loge’, Cranach the Elder’s ‘Adam and Eve’, Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear’, and the list goes on and on. Samuel Courtauld, who founded the institution, had a better eye than most, and his collection of hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings and prints is pretty staggering.
There’s everything from medieval paintings
to baroque etchings, pioneering landscape images to seriously avant garde abstraction.
The gallery is one of London’s best, and somehow least visited, art collections. It’s quiet, serene and, sure, a little old fashioned, but so full of amazing art that it barely matters. And in just a few weeks, it’s closing for at least two years, with some of the works already sent out on loan (including a gorgeous Modigliani nude and the Van Gogh pictured on the right). You have until Monday September 3 to go fill your eyes, brain and soul with some of the best works of impressionism and early modernism you’re ever likely to see.
Amadeo Modigliani, 'Female Nude'
Copyright the Samuel Courtauld Collection
Vincent van Gogh, 'Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear'
Copyright the Samuel Courtauld Collection
Paul Gauguin, 'Nevermore'
Find more art to see by clicking right here.