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Mountains Of Travel Photos

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London Photo Gallery - Courtauld Institute of Art Top 12

In 2004 and 2006 we traveled to London, England

Courtauld 00 Ouside Here are my top 12 favourite paintings at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, housed in London’s Somerset House, founded in 1931 by the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld. It now houses a large collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. The setting is ideal and the collection small enough to browse through in a few hours. This Palladian building was erected in 1786 when the river still reached the walls. Photography is allowed. There are beautiful fountains in the courtyard.

Courtauld 00 Ouside

Courtauld 01-1 Vincent Van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear 1. Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Arles, January 1889, 61 x 50 cm. On the night of December 23, 1888, Vincent van Gogh was drunk and upset that his friend Paul Gauguin was planning to leave. He waved a knife in Gauguin's face, then cut off a piece of his own ear and gave it to a prostitute. Gauguin quickly left for Paris, and van Gogh went to a hospital. A week later, Vincent looked in the mirror and saw a calm man with an unflinching gaze, dressed in a heavy coat (painted with thick, vertical strokes of blue and green) and fur-lined hat, and a slightly stained bandage over his ear.

Courtauld 01-1 Vincent Van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

Courtauld 01-2 Vincent Van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear Close Up 1. Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Here is a close up.

Courtauld 01-2 Vincent Van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear Close Up

Courtauld 02-1 Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere 2. Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. 1881-2, 96 x 130 cm. This painting was voted #3 in the 2005 BBC Greatest Painting in Britain Poll. It shows the interior of one of the most fashionable cafe-concerts in Paris. Manet distorts the mirror image - the barmaid is separated too far from her reflection; the customer with a bowler hat and cane is shown in the reflection close to the barmaid, and the placing of the bottles in the reflection does not correspond to their position on the bar in the foreground.

Courtauld 02-1 Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Courtauld 02-2 Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere Close Up 2. Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Here is a close up.

Courtauld 02-2 Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere Close Up

Courtauld 03 Edgar Degas - Two Dancers on a Stage 3. Edgar Degas - Two Dancers on the Stage. 1874, 62 x 46 cm. Degas gives no indication of whether we are watching a performance or a rehearsal of the two dancers, who are in standard ballet positions. At the far left is a third dancer, her figure cut by the frame. The ballet, with its precision of movements, fascinated him, but he always presented it in ways which revealed its artificiality, by including other extraneous elements – figures which do not watch the dancers, waiting dancers scratching themselves, or dancers who play no part in the main action, like the figure on the left here.

Courtauld 03 Edgar Degas - Two Dancers on a Stage

Courtauld 04 Pierre Auguste Renoir - La Loge 4. Pierre Auguste Renoir - La Loge. 1874, 80 x 64 cm. Renoir makes a play on the contrast between the poses of the two figures: the woman looks out with a half smile on her face and her opera glasses beside her, in her hand, as if to receive the gaze of other members of the audience. Her male companion looks through his opera glasses out from the box and upwards, and thus implicitly at another box, not down at the stage.

Courtauld 04 Pierre Auguste Renoir - La Loge

Courtauld 05 Paul Cezanne - The Montagne Saint-Victoire 5. Paul Cezanne - Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1887, 67 x 92 cm. The mountain is seen from a vantage point to the west of Aix, near Cézanne’s family home, with the valley of the Arc in the foreground and an aqueduct to the far right. The mountain oscillates in the afternoon heat, its rock faces registering as planes of blue and gold. In the foreground are square slices of houses and floating green fields.

Courtauld 05 Paul Cezanne - The Montagne Saint-Victoire

Courtauld 06 Vincent Van Gogh - Peach blossom in the Crau 6. Vincent van Gogh - Peach Blossom in the Crau, March-April 1889, 65 x 81 cm. Crau is a wide plain that lies to the north-east of Arles. Van Gogh: “the big one is a poor landscape with little cottages, blue skyline of the Alpilles foothills, sky white and blue. The foreground, patches of land surrounded by cane hedges, where small peach trees are in bloom – everything is small there, the gardens, the fields, the orchards and the trees, even the mountains, as in certain Japanese landscapes, which is the reason why the subject attracted me”.

Courtauld 06 Vincent Van Gogh - Peach blossom in the Crau

Courtauld 07 Paul Gauguin - Nevermore 7. Paul Gauguin – Nevermore. 1897, 61 x 116cm. The painting sets up a triangular relationship between the nude figure, the bird, seemingly watching, and the clothed figures in the background, turned away and talking. Gauguin: “I wished to suggest by means of a simple nude a certain long-lost barbarian luxury. . . . Man’s imagination alone has enriched this dwelling with his fantasy. As a title, Nevermore; not the raven of Edgar Poe, but the bird of the devil that is keeping watch”.

Courtauld 07 Paul Gauguin - Nevermore

Courtauld 08 Paul Cezanne - Card Players 8. Georges Seurat – A Young Woman Powdering Herself. 1888-1890, 96 x 80 cm. The plump model is Madeline Knoblock, Seurat's mistress. Perhaps Seurat wanted to show us his lady friend in her habitual surroundings - corseted like a traveling player, dressed in organdy, with heavy bracelets and a pink hair-ribbon of the kind we see attached to the round mirror on that horrible little table. In 1889 Seurat moved in with Madeleine Knoblock, a young 20 year-old model, and they had a son in 1890. Seurat died suddenly in Paris from meningitis on March 29, 1891 at the age of 31.

Courtauld 08 Paul Cezanne - Card Players

Courtauld 09 Georges Seurat - Young Woman Powdering Herself 9. Paul Cezanne - Card Players. 1890-92, 56 x 69 cm. Le père Alexandre sits upright and puffs on his pipe as he faces down his opponent. There is a cool authority to the way he stands. He's all tubes; his tall round hat, long face, sleeves, all have a mathematical roundness, making him the human equivalent of a Cézanne landscape - like the rocks, he's burned down to geometry.

Courtauld 09 Georges Seurat - Young Woman Powdering Herself

Courtauld 10 Amedeo Modigliani - Female Nude 10. Amedeo Modigliani - Female nude. 1916, 92cm x 60cm. Modigliani’s nudes were shocking in their time because they are close-up in the viewers face and are about naked women and nothing more The sleepy nude painting exhibits the preciseness of the sloping torso - the rising of the shoulder to support the blushing cheek and long chin of the drooping head; the thickness of the haunch and thigh which softly take the weight of the oblique posture, upright but half-asleep..

Courtauld 10 Amedeo Modigliani - Female Nude

Courtauld 11 Edgar Degas - After The Bath - Woman Drying Herself 11. Edgar Degas - After the Bath Woman - Drying Herself. 1889-90, 68 x 58cm. From the mid-1880s onwards, the subject of women bathing in tubs or drying themselves became one of Degas’ central preoccupations. His aims in his pictures of bathing women were to show ‘a human creature occupied with herself – a cat who licks herself. Hitherto, the nude has always been represented in poses which presupposes an audience, but these women of mine are honest and simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition … It is as if you looked through a key-hole.’

Courtauld 11 Edgar Degas - After The Bath - Woman Drying Herself

Courtauld 12 Peter Paul Rubens - Conversion of Saint Paul 12. Peter Paul Rubens - The Conversion of Saint Paul. 1610-1612, 95 x 121 cm. This painting of the dramatic scene offers the viewer an almost bird’s eye perspective of the startled entourage and St Paul. The body of St Paul is horizontal to the picture plane and is being dragged by his panicked horse as his companions try to rescue him.

Courtauld 12 Peter Paul Rubens - Conversion of Saint Paul