Collection: Courtauld Gallery

Collection-level records:

• Collection overview (Cornucopia)

  Fine Art Collection

  The Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery has one of the most important collections in Britain, including world-famous Old Master, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and an outstanding prints and drawings collection featuring works by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Czanne and Turner. The collection includes around 530 paintings, 7,000 drawings and 20,000 prints as well as significant holdings of medieval, Renaissance and modern sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, furniture and textiles. The gallery’s unique and intimate atmosphere reflects its origins as a ‘collection of collections’, largely formed through a series of major gifts and bequests made by some of the leading collectors of the 19th and 20th centuries. These include Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947), Roger Fry (1866-1934), Thomas Gambier Parry (1816-88), Viscount Lee of Fareham (1868-1947) and Count Antoine Seilern (1901-78). Details of each collection are listed separately More than 100 important works on long-term loan from several private collections since 2002. In their range and quality these broaden the scope of the existing collections, highlighting in particular the creative continuities between Post-Impressionist painters such as Czanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, and the generation of Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. There is an outstanding group of Fauve paintings which includes Derain’s The Dance and Matisse’s The Red Beach, as well as works by Charles Camoin, Henri Manguin and Albert Marquet. The German works include a number of important paintings by the group of Munich-based artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). There is also sculpture by some of the principal figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Rodin, Maillol, Matisse, Archipenko and Laurens and 11 bronzes and a selection of works on paper by Edgar Degas, one of which is a study for the famous Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer which was exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881.

  Samuel Courtauld Collection

  This world-famous collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings was assembled in the 1920s by Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947). Founded on the success of his family’s textile business, Courtauld’s collection was formed at a time when there was little public interest in recent French painting in Britain. It includes such masterpieces as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, Manet’s A Bar at the Folies- Bergre, Czanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Renoir’s La Loge. As well as amassing his own collection, Courtauld laid the foundations of the national collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art through 50,000 acquisition fund for the Tate and National Gallery. In 1932 he joined Viscount Lee of Fareham to found the Courtauld Institute, giving a large part of his collection in gifts to the Institute during the 1930s before a final bequest following his death in 1947.

  Spooner Collection

  18th and 19th century English watercolours which came to the Courtauld Institute Gallery in 1967 from William Wycliffe Spooner.

  Decorative Art Collection

  A stunning collection of 18th-century silver, made by three generations of Courtauld family silversmiths, comprising over eighty pieces, is on permanent loan from Akzo Nobel, and is shown as a spectacular buffet and table display. The Courtauld silver collection, unique of its kind, was built up from 1950 onwards by Courtaulds plc, now part of Akzo Nobel. The collection comprises pieces by three generations of 18th-century London silversmiths, members of the Huguenot Courtauld family and ancestors of Samuel Courtauld, after whom the Institute is named. Designed for domestic use and display, the items range in date from 1710 to 1779 and demonstrate the quality of workmanship and innovative design skills brought to England by Huguenot refugee craftsmen. The display is accompanied by a 48-page book, available in the Gallery Shop priced 5.00. Further information

  Gambier Parry Bequest

  The collection of Thomas Gambier Parry (1816-88) was bequeathed to the Courtauld by his grandson, Mark Gambier-Parry, in 1966. Gambier Parry assembled his collection between the 1830s and 1870s, initially purchasing 17th-century Italian paintings in keeping with mainstream mid-Victorian taste, before turning increasingly to earlier Florentine art of the 14th and 15th centuries. Outstanding among the paintings is The Crucifixion and Saints of 1348, a polyptych altarpiece by Bernardo Daddi. Other works from the collection include a set of predella panels depicting the story of St Julitta and St Quiricus by Borghese di Piero, and Nicola di Maestro Antonio di Ancona’s St Peter, together with iznik ceramics and Spanish lustreware that form part of Gambier Parry’s important collection of decorative arts.

  Lee Bequest

  Viscount Lee of Fareham (1868-1947) started assembling his collection, which is made up of European paintings 1340-1800, soon after he retired from a successful political career in 1922. An adventurous, independent-minded collector, he cared little for expert advisors, measuring his success largely in terms of discoveries and reattributions. Although sometimes opportunistic and often speculative, this approach resulted in some outstanding acquisitions, particularly of Italian Renaissance and 18th-century British paintings. Among the masterpieces in the collection are Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Botticelli’s Holy Trinity, and the important Morelli-Nerli marriage chests or cassoni of 1472. A soldier, diplomat and politician of distinction, Lee’s first great benefaction was the gift of his house, Chequers, to the nation as an official country residence for successive Prime Ministers. The founding of the Courtauld Institute of Art was also largely due to Lee, who formed the idea that Britain should have a specialist institution for the teaching of art history and bequeathed it his collection in support of this goal.

  Roger Fry Bequest

  Roger Fry (1866-1934). Formerly Curator of Old Master Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Fry was a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, an enthusiastic and influential critic and a key promoter of ‘modern’ art in Britain. An early supporter of Lord Lee’s initiative in founding the Courtauld Institute, Fry bequeathed his collection to the Institute in 1934. It included examples of his own paintings, important designs by artists associated with his Omega Workshops, and objects such as an African dancing mask from Ulvira, Lake Tanganyika, to which he accorded equal status with great European works of art. Among the works on display are Fry’s 1917 portrait of the artist Nina Hamnett, known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’, and works by members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Vanessa Bell’s A Conversation and Duncan Grant’s Portrait of Ka Cox.

  Witt Collection

  Comprising some 4,000 drawings and 25,000 prints, representing all of the main European schools, the collection contains many exceptional works, including sketches by Constable and Gainsborough, a masterful group by Guercino, and many distinguished Dutch and Flemish landscape drawings. Sir Robert Witt (1872-1952), lawyer and founder-Secretary (later Chairman) of the National Art Collections Fund, began creating a library of photographs and prints of paintings early in his career. He eventually amassed over 600,000 images which came to form the core of the Witt Library, now housed at the Courtauld Institute. Aware that the collecting of drawings was a relatively neglected field in the inter-war years, he decided to form a collection to complement his library of reproductions. Buying widely, he generally avoided the fashionable and expensive, searching out a variety of subject matter, styles and techniques. He often bought the work of artists who were little valued at the time, commenting in 1936 that ‘nowhere in the world is it possible to find so many interesting and attractive examples as in this country, or at such ridiculously low prices.’ An early and active supporter of the Courtauld Institute from the date of its founding in 1932, Witt bequeathed his collection of drawings on his death in 1952. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to view some of the masterpieces from his collection, including many works never before on public display.

  Princes Gate Bequest

  This famed collection of 14th to 20th century European art was formed by Count Antoine Seilern (1901-78), an Austrian migr who settled in England on the eve of the Second World War. Guided by his friend, the distinguished scholar Johannes Wilde, Seilern developed an interest in art history while at Vienna University in the 1930s. The paintings and drawings in his collection include works from most major European schools, outstanding among which are the 32 paintings and 20 drawings by Peter Paul Rubens, including his great Landscape by Moonlight and The Family of Jan Brueghel the Elder. Other masterpieces include the Entombment triptych by the Master of Flmalle and works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Giambattista Tiepolo, as well as paintings by Count Seilern’s Austrian contemporary, Oskar Kokoshcka. On Seilern’s death in 1978 the Princes Gate Collection numbered 138 paintings and 354 drawings, and formed one of the single greatest benefactions ever received by a British gallery.

  Source: Cornucopia

  Date: Not known, but before 2015

  Licence: CC BY-NC