History of Art Trip London
On Monday 23rd June a group of Year 12 students visited the Courtauld Gallery, an art museum in Somerset House just off the Strand.
The primary purpose of the visit was to look at the gallery’s superb collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings but, before the girls got to these paintings on the top floor of the gallery, they had the great delight of looking at a selection of Old Master paintings temporarily on loan from the Barber Institute in Birmingham.
It was a real privilege to look at high quality work by artists like Hals, Poussin, Rubens and Claude.
The layout of the Courtauld meant that, even before students had finished looking at the Barber paintings, their eyes were drawn to glimpses of masterpieces by Manet and Gauguin and Cézanne, works they were familiar with from their course.
They really relished the opportunity to look at these works in the flesh and to consider both their size and the way that paint had been applied.
The circuit of the top floor of the gallery finished with a room devoted to Impressionist works and the students enjoyed seeing the qualities in these works that were being rejected by the 1880s.
The floor beneath had important paintings from 1400-1800 and students very much enjoyed their encounter with works by Goya, Tiepolo and Rubens.
There was still sufficient energy to look at works by medieval artists on the ground floor before breaking for lunch.
The afternoon involved a walk down Fleet Street so the students could see the sudden emergence of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and then a slow walk around the beautiful English Baroque structure considering its sumptuous use of a classical architectural language.
