London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Aug 22, 2025

Courtauld’s art treasures return home for grand reopening

Courtauld’s art treasures return home for grand reopening

London gallery to showcase impressionist works that were out on loan during three-year redevelopment

Renoir’s once shocking La Loge is back from Belfast. Van Gogh’s show-stopping Self-portrait With Bandaged Ear has arrived from Amsterdam. Seurat’s Young Woman Powdering Herself from Edinburgh. A long white wall will soon have eight Cézannes, once art lovers in Bergen have finished admiring them.

“It is so thrilling. We’ve missed them,” said Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, the head of the Courtauld Gallery in London. “It is wonderful that other people have enjoyed them but it is time for them to come home.”

In November the gallery will reopen after a three-year closure. Vegelin gave the Guardian an early, exclusive tour of transformed gallery spaces which he believes will have visitors’ heads spinning.

The changes are enormous but the star of its redevelopment is the restoration of the Great Room, which will now display the Courtauld’s collection of impressionist art – one of the finest in the world.

Previously they hung on chains with picture lights in worn-out gallery spaces which had reproduction chandeliers hanging in them. “It was a 60- to 70-years-old approach to the collection,” said Vegelin. “It was oppressive and just not suitable for works of this calibre.”

The impressionists are gradually returning to the gallery to be hung in a space which was originally the Great Room of the Royal Academy in the late 18th and early 19th century but had been subdivided into four rooms. Back then, thousands of people would stream in to see new works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner and Constable in the summer exhibition.

The newly refurbished but not yet finished Great Room, where the Courtauld’s collection of impressionist paintings will hang.


The redevelopment brings back the spectacular grandeur of the room and the impressionists will sing like never before, Vegelin believes. “They feel like new pictures to me. I had become so used to seeing them in that very historical setting downstairs. The experience of them was so conditioned by the architecture and the decorative setting, they felt old in a way, they felt like old masters. Here I think people are going to get a real charge from them.”

The Courtauld’s closure was planned to be two years but delays were caused by the pandemic and the discovery of a medieval cesspit in the basement. “Not just a small one … huge,” said Vegelin. “They dug and they dug and they dug. I think it was three or four metres deep, so obviously all the work stopped and that set us back.”

The transformation of the gallery is top to bottom and includes using backroom space. For example, what was once a toilet, security control room and store will now be the medieval and early renaissance gallery.

For the first time, the refurbishment allows wheelchair access to the main entrance, which has been made bigger to reduce congestion and queues that used to stretch to the branch of Greggs on the Strand outside.

New temporary exhibition spaces have been created and named after donor Denise Coates, the betting billionaire who founded Bet365 from her father’s Stoke-on-Trent bookmaking business.

The upside of the long closure was sending works around the world. The Van Gogh self-portrait is particularly fragile and would never normally travel but, rather than put it in storage, it was loaned to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam – “a one-off opportunity for it to live with its brothers and sisters”, said Vegelin.

There were tours of works which went to Tokyo and Paris. “It has been absolutely wonderful,” he added. “To eavesdrop on people as they stand in wonder in front of a painting like Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, you just feel a great sense of pride.”

The Courtauld Connects programme sent works around the UK to places that, in the first half of the 20th century, helped generate the fortune of the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld, allowing him to buy his collection. It included lending a Boudin to Preston, drawings to Coventry and Monet’s Antibes to Hull.

The redevelopment cost an estimated £57m but the gallery said that includes elements such as the loans programme, the temporary move of students to King’s Cross, digitisation and the creation of a learning centre.

Paintings and works of art are gradually returning before the grand reopening, which promises to be one of the UK’s cultural highlights of the year.“To have them now come home is really quite emotional,” said Vegelin.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
After 200,000 Orders in 2 Minutes: Xiaomi Accelerates Marketing in Europe
Ukraine Declares De Facto War on Hungary and Slovakia with Terror Drone Strikes on Their Gas Lifeline
Animated K-pop Musical ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Becomes Netflix’s Most-Watched Original Animated Film
New York Appeals Court Voids Nearly $500 Million Civil Fraud Penalty Against Trump While Upholding Fraud Liability
Elon Musk tweeted, “Europe is dying”
Far-Right Activist Convicted of Incitement Changes Gender and Demands: "Send Me to a Women’s Prison" | The Storm in Germany
Hungary Criticizes Ukraine: "Violating Our Sovereignty"
Will this be the first country to return to negative interest rates?
Child-free hotels spark controversy
North Korea is where this 95-year-old wants to die. South Korea won’t let him go. Is this our ally or a human rights enemy?
Hong Kong Launches Regulatory Regime and Trials for HKD-Backed Stablecoins
China rehearses September 3 Victory Day parade as imagery points to ‘loyal wingman’ FH-97 family presence
Trump Called Viktor Orbán: "Why Are You Using the Veto"
Horror in the Skies: Plane Engine Exploded, Passengers Sent Farewell Messages
MSNBC Rebrands as MS NOW Amid Comcast’s Cable Spin-Off
AI in Policing: Draft One Helps Speed Up Reports but Raises Legal and Ethical Concerns
Shame in Norway: Crown Princess’s Son Accused of Four Rapes
Apple Begins Simultaneous iPhone 17 Production in India and China
A Robot to Give Birth: The Chinese Announcement That Shakes the World
Finnish MP Dies by Suicide in Parliament Building
Outrage in the Tennis World After Jannik Sinner’s Withdrawal Storm
William and Kate Are Moving House – and the New Neighbors Were Evicted
Class Action Lawsuit Against Volkswagen: Steering Wheel Switches Cause Accidents
Taylor Swift on the Way to the Super Bowl? All the Clues Stirring Up Fans
Dogfights in the Skies: Airbus on Track to Overtake Boeing and Claim Aviation Supremacy
Tim Cook Promises an AI Revolution at Apple: "One of the Most Significant Technologies of Our Generation"
Apple Expands Social Media Presence in China With RedNote Account Ahead of iPhone 17 Launch
Are AI Data Centres the Infrastructure of the Future or the Next Crisis?
Cambridge Dictionary Adds 'Skibidi,' 'Delulu,' and 'Tradwife' Amid Surge of Online Slang
Bill Barr Testifies No Evidence Implicated Trump in Epstein Case; DOJ Set to Release Records
Zelenskyy Returns to White House Flanked by European Allies as Trump Pressures Land-Swap Deal with Putin
The CEO Who Replaced 80% of Employees for the AI Revolution: "I Would Do It Again"
Emails Worth Billions: How Airlines Generate Huge Profits
Character.ai Bets on Future of AI Companionship
China Ramps Up Tax Crackdown on Overseas Investments
Japanese Office Furniture Maker Expands into Bomb Shelter Market
Intel Shares Surge on Possible U.S. Government Investment
Hurricane Erin Threatens U.S. East Coast with Dangerous Surf
EU Blocks Trade Statement Over Digital Rule Dispute
EU Sends Record Aid as Spain Battles Wildfires
JPMorgan Plans New Canary Wharf Tower
Zelenskyy and his allies say they will press Trump on security guarantees
Beijing is moving into gold and other assets, diversifying away from the dollar
Escalating Clashes in Serbia as Anti-Government Protests Spread Nationwide
The Drought in Britain and the Strange Request from the Government to Delete Old Emails
Category 5 Hurricane in the Caribbean: 'Catastrophic Storm' with Winds of 255 km/h
"No, Thanks": The Mathematical Genius Who Turned Down 1.5 Billion Dollars from Zuckerberg
The surprising hero, the ugly incident, and the criticism despite victory: "Liverpool’s defense exposed in full"
Digital Humans Move Beyond Sci-Fi: From Virtual DJs to AI Customer Agents
YouTube will start using AI to guess your age. If it’s wrong, you’ll have to prove it
×