The Courtauld Institute of Art
Samuel Courtauld, of the textile fortune, collected Impressionists when they were still controversial and endowed an institute in 1932 to make their study a discipline rather than a pastime. The Courtauld Gallery and the institute grew together; students learn connoisseurship in rooms hung with Cézannes and Van Goghs, at Somerset House on the Strand.
Its alumni staff the world's museums to a degree that approaches monopoly — the joke in the art world is that the Courtauld is where curators are minted. Its wartime director, Anthony Blunt, was revealed in 1979 as a Soviet spy, a scandal the institute survived with its scholarship intact and its self-knowledge improved.
Field notes
- Manet's 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' hangs here — the most examined wine bottle in art history.
- Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, was revealed in 1979 as the 'fourth man' of Cambridge espionage.
- The Conway Library — a million photographs of architecture — is open to all comers.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
The study of art history as a single-subject vocation, founded by the industrialist Samuel Courtauld around his collection of Impressionists — Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère among them — now at Somerset House.
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