Courtauld Impressionists: From Manet to Cézanne review

The National Gallery is evolving: a museum in vivid transition. This autumn it will offer not one but four special exhibitions, spanning more than half a millennium, from Mantegna and Bellini in the 1400s to the satirical nightmares of contemporary film-maker Rachel Maclean. The permanent collection is being ingeniously rearranged in dialogue with these shows, which include Britain’s first survey of that most enigmatic and piercing of portraitists, Lorenzo Lotto. The season opens this week with the enthralling Courtauld Impressionists.

The Sunflowers, The Bathers, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: all were set before the British public by the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947). It is no understatement to say that our experience of art would not be so rich without him. Courtauld began buying impressionist paintings in the early 1920s – Cézanne’s apples, Monet’s waterlilies, a late self-portrait by Van Gogh, alone and wintry with his poor bandaged ear. The private collection he amassed was mostly given to the institute that bears his name, but Courtauld also established a fund for the purchase of paintings by the National and Tate Galleries.

This is how we come to have Manet’s deathless portrait of the barmaid leaning impassively on the counter, in-turned, distracted, the disparity between her public and private selves echoed in the famously mismatched reflections of the mirror behind her. It is how we have Seurat’s monumental vision of Parisians arranged along the Seine like chess pieces in the luminous light of Asnières. And with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Courtauld effectively gave the National Gallery its most popular modern painting; which is presumably why it hangs in the main galleries outside this show, honourably free to the public.

Review here