The aim of doing all the rooms in a gallery isn’t necessarily to look at every exhibit in the place. It is to:
- discover the out-of-the-way corners where treasures are sometimes hidden
- get a feel for the complete geography of a place, to understand how it fits together as a building
- and understand how the works exhibited in it fit together to tell a story (or multiple stories)
Background
The Courtauld Gallery houses the art collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art, a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art.
The Courtauld collection was formed largely through donations and bequests and includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works from medieval to modern times. It’s a kind of miniature National Gallery, following the same story of Western art through a much smaller selection of, in many ways more exquisite, pieces. It’s best known for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings; those rooms are always packed.
In total, the collection contains some 530 paintings and over 26,000 drawings and prints, displayed in 12 rooms over three floors reached via the charming old stone circular staircase.
The rooms
Room one:13th to 15th century
30 paintings and altar pieces, a big statue of the crowned Virgin Mary, 12 exquisite little ivory carvings, five caskets, a marriage chest and 12 pieces of Islamic metalwork. I liked:
- The ivory Virgin and child with a chaffinch. I understand the symbolism, having seen the same subject at the V&A ie the chaffinch was thought to eat seeds from thorny plants, thus prefiguring the crown of thorns which the little baby Jesus was destined to wear 33 years later.
- An ivory depicting ‘Scenes from the life of Jesus’, with an Ascension scene where the crowd are, Monty Python-style, looking up at a tunic and pair of sandals disappearing out of the frame (top left section).
- What I liked about the medieval ivories is that the figures are cramped and packed into the composition, yet important ones, the Virgin in particular, are still willowy and sinuous; it’s the combination of cramped with willowy which is one of their appeals.
- I discovered I like Robert Campin at the National Gallery: here, I liked his Seilern Triptych (1425). The most obvious thing is how dark it is; he uses an intense black to create variety or drama across the picture plane. On a separate level, I also liked the use of the grapes motif in the gilt background. And homely details like the handmade hedge in the bottom right.
- Compare, in terms of light, with the nearby Coronation of the Virgin by Lorenzo Monaco, amazingly sumptuous and golden, but without the extremes of black, the density and drama of the Campin.
- I realised at the National Gallery that I like northern European medieval and Renaissance painting for its concern for individuals. A good example here is the portrait of Guillaume Fillastre from the workshop of Roger van der Weyden (1430s)
- Ugliest baby award went to Virgin and Child with angels by Quentin Massys
Mezzanine room: ‘Panorama’
Half-way up the stairs to the first floor is a small room which holds changing displays of prints. Currently it houses 14 drawings or prints on the theme of ‘the panoramic view’, including Canaletto, two Turners, a Towne etc. The wall label said the panorama derives from Dutch interest in landscapes, confirming my view of northern Europe as being humanist, interested in individuals and places, as opposed to Italy and Spain, home to countless images of the simpering Madonna, weeping saints and the limp corpse of Jesus, all set in rocky, barren deserts.
- Thomas Girton View of Paris and the Seine
- Canaletto View from Somerset House ie from the building we are standing in, seen 300 years ago
- Cozens London from Greenwich Hill
- Compare and contrast with the Turner: I’m afraid visiting the 8 rooms of the Clore Galleries at Tate Britain, confirmed my dislike of Turner and this rooms contains a couple of examples of his characteristic grandiosity, with some maladroit human figures thrown in – Rome from San Pietro in Montorio (1820)
Room two: 16th century Renaissance Europe
19 paintings and some painted marriage chests, objects whose long narrow front panels are well suited to paintings depicting processions or battle scenes. There are also 23 Renaissance ceramics in an exhibition case, but the room is dominated by Botticelli’s Trinity with saints. As I discovered in the National Gallery, I like Botticelli as a cartoonist but not as a serious painter of the human condition.
Room three: 17th century Rubens and the Baroque
18 paintings, 11 of them Rubens, and a chest. My favourites were:
- Cranach Adam and Eve (1526) for the medieval feel, the sumptuous northern flora, and the symbolic animals. Although it’s a well known story, the painting has a strange mysterious air, as if pregnant with additional, hidden meanings.
- Hans Mielich Portrait of Anna Reitnor (1539) A typically north European, humanistic and individualistic portrait of a specific person. Compare and contrast with…
- Rubens Cain killing Abel The wall label can go on about what Rubens had learned from his visit to Italy and his debt to Michelangelo – this still seems to me an over-muscled, deformed account of the human body, glorifying in a kind of murder porn.
- Similarly, I disliked the nine sketches by Tiepolo, typified by St Aloysius Gonzaga. Words can’t convey the kitsch nastiness of this Catholic propaganda.
Room four: 18th century Enlightenment
As at the National Gallery, it is a great relief to walk from rooms full of tortured saints, crucified Christs and weeping Maries into the common sense, calmness and reason of the English Enlightenment. This rooms contains a pleasant selection of comfortable, bourgeois paintings by Romney, Ramsay, Gainsborough and display cases full of silver plate, cups and so on. I liked:
- Gainsborough Portrait of Charles Tudway (1765) typical feathery leaves.
- Gainsborough Portrait of Mrs Gainsborough (1778) The wife, in all her aged frailty and reality.
- William Beechey Portrait of Queen Charlotte (1812) The dog is not persuasive but the face seems to me the face of a real person.
Room five: 19th century Early Impressionism
And now for something completely different, the rooms the Courtauld is famous for, this one holding 6 paintings, 2 sculptures. I liked:
- Degas Two dancers on stage (1874) He did hundreds of studies and oils of this subject, this one is good.
- Renoir La Loge (1874) When I went to see the Inventing Impressionism show at the National Gallery, Renoir emerged for me as the most consistent of the Impressionists, finding his style early and sticking to it, in paintings that look more consistently finished than his colleagues’ ones.
- Monet Autumn effect at Argenteuil (1873) Exactly the kind of Monet which looks better compacted onto a computer screen or chocolate box, than how it appears here, in the flesh, where it is much larger, much blurrier and wispier.
- Compare and contrast with Manet’s Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil (1874). The wall label says this is the most impressionist painting Manet ever did, made while he was staying at Monet’s house at Argenteuil. Although using the same short dabs of paint and showing the same hazy disregard for detail, as his friend, the striking thing is the quality of the black in the painting, a really deep, intense, black black, there in the boat but especially the woman’s hat, and giving the other colours, especially the blue, a darker hue. This gives the whole painting a greater intensity. It kind of roots it into a starker world, a firmer world, than anything in the pink and yellow creations of Monet’s which are hanging near it.
Room six :19th century Impressionism and post-impressionism
- Manet The bar at the Folies Bergers (1880) This isn’t a very good reproduction, but again it highlights the importance of black in Manet’s compositions.
- Cézanne The card players (1896) The stylisation of the human form is completely convincing.
- Cézanne Mont St Victoire (1887) Characteristic deployment of the blocks and rectangles of colour which anticipate cubism.
- Gauguin Te Rerioa (1897) I didn’t like Gauguin when I was young. I think exposure to lots and lots of tribal and native art has helped me ‘read’ him better, so that now I just accept and enjoy the whole composition.
- Gauguin Nevermore (1897)
Room seven: 19th century Post-impressionism
Just seven paintings, the standout specimen being Self-portrait with a bandaged ear by Vincent van Gogh. I like the strong back lines and the forceful, not necessarily realistic colouring.
Room eight:
An exhibition room this is currently dedicated to Bridget Riley: learning from Seurat.
Room nine: 20th century French painting
12 paintings and statues by among others Derain, Braque, early Matisse, Vlaminck.
- Vlaminck Banks of the Seine at Carrières-sur-Seine (1906) Fauvist, wild savage use of colour, but still recognisably figurative.
- Matisse Still life with fruit and flowers (1906) I liked its unfinished, tentative state. I always like unfinished paintings, sketches and cartoons.
Room ten: 20th century French painting 1905 to 1920
12 paintings, including specimens by Dufy, Bonnard, Picasso, Léger, all dominated by the Modigliani.
- Modigliani Female nude (1916) Perfectly and completely itself.
Room eleven a: Late 19th-early 20th century painting
8 paintings.
- Cézanne Route tournante (1905) a) Unfinished, so I like it. b) Even more of Cézanne’s characteristic cubes and blocks of paint, creating a powerfully dynamic image.
- Degas Woman at a window Unfinished and with strong black lines, a wonderful visionary image.
Room eleven b: 19th century
Seurat sketches. A small room with 8 tiny paintings by Seurat (died 1891)
Room 12: 20th century German Expressionists
A bit of a relief to emerge from the fuzziness of France into the bright, barbarian virility of strident German expressionism. 12 big bold crude paintings.
- Gabriele Münter Portrait of a Young Woman in a Large Hat (1909)
- Alexej Jawlensky Manola (1913) Big, bold, unafraid. The lipstick!
- Max Pechstein Women by the sea (1919)
Room 13: 20th century British painting
Half a dozen big horrible paintings by Leon Kossof and Frank Auerbach, with an early Lucien Freud to brighten the gloom.
- Leon Kossoff York Way Railway Bridge from Caledonian Road, Winter (1966 to 1967) And in the Summer of Love, too! It looks like the thick, sludgey oil is still running.
- Frank Auerbach Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962) Yuk.
- Lucien Freud Girl with roses (1947)
Rooms 14 and 15
Devoted to temporary exhibitions, earlier in the year Goya’s Witches and Old Women Album, currently the wonderful show of Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings.
Conclusions
If I didn’t know before, spending three hours walking slowly through these wonderful rooms packed with treasures, made me realise a few simple things about my taste:
- I like unfinished paintings, sketches and cartoons, where the image/work/composition is struggling to emerge, struggling to create order and beauty from the chaos of perception, or has the pathos and fragility of incompletion.
- I like firm lines which define the subject, especially the human subject, as in Degas or van Gogh.
- I like works which contain deep black blacks: for some reason its presence makes the entire work seem deeper, as if the spectrum from a really deep black to the light which illuminates the object is wider, and so makes the experience of the colours on the canvas or wood, deeper and richer.
Related links
Every room in other museums and galleries
- Every room in Tate Britain (part one)
- Every room in the British Museum
- Every room in the National Gallery
Books & Boots 