Paul Cézanne’s “Card Players”
21st Oct 2010 – 16th Jan 2011 This landmark exhibition will bring together Cézanne’s famous series of paintings of peasants playing cards, which has long been considered among his most important works. These remarkable paintings will be shown alongside some rarely seen preparatory oil sketches and drawings.
The Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery was founded by Samuel Courtauld in 1931, as an adjunct to the University of London.
The idea was to provide the university with a collection equivalent to the famous museums of Oxford and Cambridge – the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam.
Courtauld started the ball rolling by bequeathing his entire art collection to it upon his death, as did several other notaries – Robert Witt, William Spooner and Viscount Lee of Fareham.
The Courtauld soon gained a notable reputation, and now houses one of Europe’s finest collections of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings with works by Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Monet.
The stand-out pieces are Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, Monet’s Autumn at Argenteuil, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Botticelli’s Trinity with John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.
The gallery’s premises were augmented in 1991 when it moved from Portman Square to the refined surroundings of Somerset House.
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Courtauld Institute of Art
‘Bar at the Folies-Bergere’, by Manet