London: Nov 2: Courtauld Gallery

On Tuesday, November 2, I disappeared from work to explore the Courtauld Gallery. It's housed at Somerset House, a grand building which I previously photographed and also plan to return to again to explore the other galleries inside.

The Courtauld Gallery's works extend from 14th century religious art through the Italian Renaissance and into impressionism, post-impressionism, and some fields of 20th century painting (French, expressionist, etc.). I definitely liked the impressionist and post-impressionist section the best; this also happens to be the section for which the museum is famous. The collection includes many Cezannes, Manets, Renoirs, and Seurats, and also Pisarro, Monet, Rousseau, Gauguin, and van Gogh. It's uniformly high quality; the museum clearly prefers quality over quantity. Elsewhere, I spotted and noted multiple Rubens, Degas, Maurice de Vlaminck, George Braque, Matisse, and Kandinsky.

I took pictures in the museum.

I also went to the Courtauld's special exhibit of Cezanne's paintings of peasants, often playing cards or smoking a pipe. It's interesting to compare his multiple versions of the same scene and the drafts (a.k.a. studies) he did in preparation. (The exhibit displays all of these.) It's clear he likes drawing his peasants as solid, monumental men (or, if you were an art critic, you'd write men with "gravitas and stoicism").

By the way, the rooms in the Courtauld Gallery are worth mentioning in themselves. They're fairly fancy, with elaborate ceiling plasterwork flourishes. If I read a sign correctly, some of the rooms are transplanted copies of Victorian rooms that were originally elsewhere in London.

I spent a bit over one and a half hours in the museum.