When the Courtauld’s sellout Monet show closed last month, it seemed like its temporary exhibition galleries would never glow so brightly. But a few weeks later, they shine again with a rare, brilliant group of mostly impressionist paintings — also showing in London for the first time — and including an exceptional Monet.
In “La Débâcle” (1880-81), dissolving patches of ice on the Seine, tinged silver-pink in late afternoon light, are interspersed with broken reflections of tall, bare poplars. Painted in Vétheuil during the bitter winter of 1879, just after Monet’s first wife had died, this lustrously bleak vision prefigures, in its risky play of the real and the mirrored, the abstracted waterlilies dotting the Giverny pond.
Every painting in Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, a gathering of two dozen works visiting from the villa museum Am Römerholz in Winterthur, Switzerland, is not only delicious and memorable; each holds special weight within the artist’s oeuvre, or mattered particularly to another artist.
Cézanne’s fierce, youthful “Portrait of Dominique Aubert” (c1866), the massive head created by paint smeared on in fat slabs, was once owned by Monet. Cézanne especially admired Courbet’s thundering seascapes, such as “The Wave” (1870), and emulated their palette-knife method. Courbet’s tide, Cézanne wrote, “hits you right in the stomach. You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”
That describes the Courtauld’s opening gallery: “The Wave” (1869) rushes at you as you enter. On one side is Manet’s homage to Spain, “Portrait of Marguerite de Conflans Wearing a Mantilla” (1873), a bravura rendering of translucent white lace against black hair and background; opposite, in Goya’s “Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks” (1808-12), glistening raw fish similarly burst out of darkness. It’s an electrifying meeting: reinventing figure painting for a modern age, Manet intently studied Spanish heightened realism.
In the second room, two eyes bore into you: the piercing gaze of impressionist supporter Victor Chocquet, with punk-green hair and hollowed cheeks. Chocquet greets us with the zeal, according to Renoir’s friend Georges Rivière, that he turned on mockers at impressionist exhibitions: “he lashed them with ironical remarks . . . eloquent, ingenious . . . vehement, domineering . . . without losing the urbanity which made him the most charming and formidable of opponents.” After Chocquet’s death, Renoir’s eccentric portrait was unsold for decades until Reinhart bought it.
A buoyant sense emerges here of impressionism’s experiments, debates and battles. Renoir’s stark, huge still life “Lily and Greenhouse Plants” (1864) — starring a calla lily oddly scaled to full figure portrait size amid jarring colours of blue hydrangeas and flaming tulips — recovers the strangeness that disturbed initial viewers. Manet bought Sisley’s limpid “Barges on the Saint-Martin Canal” (1870), its staccato choppy strokes imitating rippling water, at the moment he was considering painting en plein air himself, after long resistance.
Such were the conversations that Swiss merchant Reinhart wanted to explore when he began seriously building his collection in 1922, setting out from Winterthur, a small town north of Zurich, to cherry-pick purchases from Paris and Berlin dealers. Samuel Courtauld started collecting the same year, and a charm of the exhibition is how markedly Reinhart’s collection echoes the Courtauld’s, and also connects to the pictures that Courtauld was then acquiring for London’s National Gallery.
Each bought half of an ambivalent painting of blank-faced strangers — or are they reluctant associates? — drinking in Paris’s Brasserie de Reichshoffen, which Manet, in a rage, had cut in two. Reinhart’s “Au Café” (1878) and the National Gallery’s “Corner of a Café-Concert” thus became separate depictions of urban alienation, their fate as pictures reiterating Manet’s theme of disunity and isolation within the crowd. Reinhart coveted his picture for years, after seeing it in the home of Berlin mathematician Otto Gerstenberg. Courtauld returned to the subject with the great enigma “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882).
Each collector acquired a mid-1870s Renoir posed by fine-boned, long-lashed model Nini Lopez — Reinhart’s “The Milliner” (c1875), the Courtauld’s “La Loge” (1874); each chose a Toulouse-Lautrec Moulin Rouge performer. The Courtauld has Jane Avril; Reinhart’s “The Clowness Cha-U-Kao” (1895), in green knickerbockers, flouncy yellow ruff and absurd topknot, hands thrust in pockets, expression indifferent, is a magnificent don’t-give-a-damn female power portrait.
Close too are the collections’ Van Goghs, alluding to the trauma of the mutilated ear: the Courtauld’s “Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear” (1889), and Reinhart’s little-known, spellbinding depictions of the Arles hospital where the wounded artist was admitted.
“A Ward in the Hospital at Arles” (1889), with its claustrophobic linear interior featuring awkward patients, nurses and rows of curtained beds, and exaggerated vanishing point, is painful in its empathy — “One perhaps learns how to live from the sick,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother from here. “The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles” (1889) is not quite its opposite: though illuminated by a radiant garden of criss-crossing plants, the flower beds’ blots of colour recalling a painter’s palette, “dark and sad tree trunks” course the ground — “like snakes”, Van Gogh explained.
Asserting the key position accorded to both artists in the 1920s, the Van Goghs share the main gallery wall here with symphonic Cézannes — two Provence landscapes and the late “Still Life with Faience Jug and Fruit” (c1900) in rich burnished hues. The leaf-pattern curtain rising up the picture, and tumbling near-transparent white cloth, give it the force and presence of a landscape.
Courtauld acquired several important Cézannes in the 1920s — the Courtauld has the UK’s largest collection. During the same period, Reinhart’s obsession was to find “an outstanding landscape” by Cézanne; he rushed to Copenhagen when collector Wilhelm Hansen had to dissolve his collection following the crash of Denmark’s Landsmansbank in 1922, and swooped on “Le Pilon du Roi” (1887-8).
The rocky outcrop of the Étoile mountains is framed by foliage: solid leaves in thick paint meet an ethereal sky. Striated ribbons of colour — pale green, yellow, dark blue — denoting receding fields and hills, are laced with reverberating colour patches, such as the cool blue shadowing the maize. It’s a strikingly lyrical example of “harmony parallel to nature”, as Cézanne defined his aim. Everything is airy, vibrant, giving a mirage-like feeling of shimmering heat, and also majestic, monumental.
Here and in “The Château Noir” (c1885), considered Cézanne’s first painting of the beloved motif, you see why construction through colour and basic shapes — overlapping blue-green and ochre planes plunge you deep into a forest of columnar trees, diagonal branches, half-obscuring the cube of a building — riveted the next generation.
Having sought impressionism’s predecessors — Courbet, Corot, Daumier — to understand the movement, in 1935 Reinhart, aged 50, bought an important blue period Picasso. “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto” (1901). The slender nervy figure outlined as in Van Gogh, the forms beginning to be simplified and abstracted following Cézanne, casts its eerie sheen at the end of this marvellous exhibition, pointing forwards as well as looking back.
February 14-May 26, courtauld.ac.uk
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