Rubens, Manet, Bruegel … curator picks the gems from the reopened Courtauld Gallery

A coterie of the best-known faces in art has returned to the banks of the Thames, ready for public scrutiny this month. Paul Cézanne’s card players have been in Norway, while a bandaged Vincent van Gogh has been visiting Amsterdam. Claude Monet’s image of a sun-drenched tree on a beach in Antibes took a summer trip to Hull.

Now back home together, they are hanging in the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House, on the Strand in central London, after a three-year refurbishment that has let in light and created space. The building work, estimated to have cost about £57m, including arranging the loan of exhibits to other galleries, has brought the large first-floor Great Room, the setting for Britain’s first Royal Academy summer exhibitions, between 1780 and 1836, back to its original stately grandeur.

The gallery and its academic institute have been based at Somerset House since 1989, displaying a collection the core of which was once owned by textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld. He co-founded the institute that bears his name only 90 years ago, bequeathing his entire store of international art to the nation on his death in 1947.

The man now in charge of the collection is art historian Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen (below), the Dutch-born, English-educated director of the gallery.

He follows former notable directors of the past associated with the institute, such as Peter Lasko and the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

The Observer asked Vegelin to pick out a few of his favourite images from the walls of the Courtauld. Among them are several beloved works, together with a blast of anarchy from the avant-garde vorticist movement created by a British female artist with a reputation that is on the ascent.

Édouard Manet: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

Am I allowed to have the Manet? The bar? I can say, hand on heart, it never ceases to intrigue and excite me. We are most famous for our impressionists, and this is one of the most famous of those.

It was acquired by Samuel Courtauld himself for £22,600, the most he ever paid for a painting, or at least equal top with Renoir’s La Loge, which he bought the year before. It is now going to be at the centre of our display in the reclaimed Great Room, but we had quite a lot of discussion about how to present it. We didn’t want our visitors to see it immediately they enter the gallery. We knew that the barmaid, Suzon, would dominate the space, so we have put the painting around the side. She looks directly at you, the viewer, making you part of the painting.

The gold band that runs behind is the frame of the mirror and laid out in front are sophisticated mandarins, peppermint liqueur and unopened champagne bottles. The two white globes are thought to be early electric lights.

The great puzzle remains her reflection, which he has moved from the logical position. It’s a dislocation that catches the eye. People also wonder about her expression. Now it is interpreted as looking bored or alienated, but that’s quite a contemporary lens. In the past people felt she was more enigmatic or even jolly.

She is a later equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Manet painted it in 1882, the year before he died, so it is a summation of his career as a painter of modern life. It was painted for the Paris salon, the annual state show, which was always extremely crowded. He designed it to stand out. Manet refused invitations to join young artists in other shows, because he believed the revolution in art needed to come from within the establishment.

Helen Saunders: Composition with Figures, Black and White (1915)

Now a drawing. They are always compelling for their immediacy and somehow much more approachable than a fully completed complex painting, which it can be hard to imagine someone creating. The drawing process is clearer to us. We have 7,000 drawings in total, and we’ve just received a wonderful gift of 25 modern and postwar drawings.

The one I’ve picked is a black-and-white pen-and-ink example by a member of the vorticist movement, Helen Saunders. In 2016 we were given 20 of her drawings, the largest group of her work in any collection. She is a very interesting artist, and overlooked for decades. In recent years she has come to the attention of scholars and curators and, hopefully, now also the public.

She started off attached to the Bloomsbury group and to the artist Roger Fry, then switched allegiance to a more radical group: the vorticists. They were led by Wyndham Lewis and only really operated for two years. They were determined to communicate a sense of modern life with machinery, and show the importance of the 20th-century city.

Saunders signed her name on the movement’s 1915 manifesto, printed in its magazine, Blast, but spelled her name differently because she didn’t want her family to know of the association.

I have picked a very characteristic work of hers. A pen and ink that is a very tough-edged abstraction with geometric shapes. It seems to be a group of figures, and there are two abstract figures at the top, but they may be machine forms, and there are rays of light going downwards.

It is a really accomplished piece of work which is completely uncompromising in its abstractions.

An exhibition in the Pompidou Centre in Paris this year featured her work, but there is going to be much more to say about Helen Saunders.

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Adam and Eve (1526)

I came to know this picture 30 years ago when I first visited the Courtauld, and it’s one that has stayed with me: more even than the Cézannes, Van Goghs and Monets. It’s very seductive and beguiling. It has a sophistication to it as there is no sense of moralising or condemnation of this dramatic moment for the whole of humanity.

There is not a cloud in the sky, and Cranach has obviously delighted in depicting all the animals, clearly drawn from life – except for the lion, which appears to have been copied, with the result that it’s rather timid and sweet and pet-able.

And then there is Eve’s quite fantastic great spray of curly hair. And Adam is scratching his head, as if he is thinking, “This is wrong, but I can’t resist this apple.” The serpent is already slithering through the branches above them and the grapes are there as a symbol of the eucharist, the blood of Christ and the suggestion of redemption. There are multiple versions of this work but this is very much the finest.

Rubens admired his friend Jan Brueghel’s father and collected his works. He owned about 10 paintings, although they are very rare. We have one of those.

This is a delightful landscape, with the holy family in the foreground, but almost secondary to the beautiful panoramic background. They are fleeing persecution and being led by Joseph, with the Madonna cradling the Christ child. The group have just passed a pagan shrine and you can see that it has toppled, which aligns with the legend that when the true Christ passed by, all pagan symbols would fall. And to the left at the bottom of the picture we can see they are going to have to navigate a gorge via a bridge. This is an indication of the arduous journey they are going to have.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger was one of the first northern artists to cross the Alps, in about 1604. And it was said that he swallowed all of the mountains and brought them back to spill them out in Antwerp. In his landscapes he uses the formula of painting in brown at the front, then green in the middle and blue for the background, further away. It gives wonderful perspective. It is very nice to think that Rubens had this painting hanging in his home and that it was important to him.

It was first owned by Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, quite a tough guy who was minister of the Spanish crown in the Netherlands. In fact, we also have a portrait of him in the gallery.

Peter Paul Rubens: Family of Jan Brueghel the Elder (c. 1613-15)

I love this. It has an immediacy that speaks across 400 years. As a husband and a father myself, the personal element is something I relate to. And my love of the picture is also born of my admiration for Rubens, both as a collector and as one of the greatest artists ever to pick up a brush.

He brings everything with him from the Renaissance and then looks forward to what art was to become. We have 25 of his paintings, 201 original letters and an inventory handwritten after his death, much of which will now be on display in one room.

But this painting, made in 1615 in Antwerp, somehow covers his full range. It’s a portrait of the wife and children of his friend Jan, son of the painter Pieter Bruegel, and it’s about family and friendship. Interestingly, he does not show his friend as a painter, but as a father, although the two friends worked together, with Rubens painting the figures and Jan Brueghel the landscape.

It’s a very touching depiction of the children. The daughter, Elizabeth, is gazing up at her mother, while the boy, Peter, is wearing almost a cavalier outfit. I have a 13-year-old son, so it would have been more realistic for me, I suppose, if he’d been in shorts, holding a football, off to the park.

This is such an ingenious composition, with Catharina, the wife, with her stiffer neck ruff, at the heart of the picture, while her husband has his arm protectively around her and their son. The image comes together around this affectionate knot of hands, with the son touching, or indicating, his mother’s bracelet. This piece of jewellery seems to have meant a lot to the family, as it appears with them in other portraits, some painted by Jan himself.