The Courtauld Gallery’s subtle, radical refurbishment

It is one of the most famous images of people looking at art in a gallery. Thomas Rowlandson’s “Exhibition Room, Somerset House” depicts a crowd of connoisseurs and flâneurs, dandies and officers, demure ladies and fat parsons, all hemmed in by a barrage of paintings, hung high and angled down towards the crowd to make them more visible. The paintings, with their elaborate gold frames, appear to be an architecture in themselves, a structure within a structure; the scrum of humanity is complemented by the mass of pictures.

Painted in 1808, it shows the Summer Exhibition, nearly 40 years after the Royal Academy became the first tenant of newly built Somerset House. This was the first purpose-built public art gallery in Britain, and the Great Room which Rowlandson depicts, with its arched lantern windows, was one of the city’s finest public interiors (accessible for a shilling). 

The Courtauld, which moved here in 1989, was one of a long succession of inhabitants, each adapting and changing the accommodation over centuries, subdividing rooms, blocking windows and lanterns, inserting false ceilings and juggling walls. Now, after a £50m refurbishment, that gallery depicted by Rowlandson is back as the culmination of the gallery’s new incarnation. And it is grand.

Like most of the finest work in historic buildings, this is one of those projects where a huge amount of intellectual engagement, design, physical work and skilled craft has created an overall impression that not much has changed. But it has. Architects Witherford Watson Mann have laboured over a complex weaving of new and historic fabric, technology, time and space to reform radically an institution that may once have been designed as an art gallery but which was far from perfect for display and public access.

When William Chambers began designing Somerset House in 1776, it was conceived as a new kind of urban palace, a space for public offices, learned societies, tax collectors, civil servants and naval administrators. It has an interesting counterpart in Paris, the building that became the Hôtel de la Marine, which has itself recently reopened to the public.

Somerset House was a symbol of London’s status as an enlightenment city and capital of empire, an odd mix of bureaucracy, war and learning, a reimagining of the palace as an imposing office block with a looming presence on the Thames. Its land had to be acquired piecemeal, so the building is a compromise, an eccentric arrangement carefully designed to look symmetrical and grand but full of anomalies and strange junctions with the houses next door.

The north wing, on the Strand, was designed almost as a range of houses to contain a bizarre mix of societies and offices for emerging institutions including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, but also the Hawkers and Pedlars Office, the Hackney Coach Office and the Lottery Office, becoming, effectively, Britain’s first office block.

The Royal Academy (which was accommodated here until 1837) was housed in a complex section of interlocking spaces and a mix of domestically scaled and imposing urban rooms above the grand archway to the Strand. Over the years, layers of accretions, changes and adaptations had led to a complex, impossibly dense interior. The architects have intervened carefully but extensively.

The key moves have been to connect the spaces bottom and top. The vaults now run through the width of the building and the top-floor galleries interconnect. Rooms have been relined, refined, from floors to frescoes via the fireplaces, with the added complication of concealing huge new services and air-handling systems.

There is a new entrance and lobby, a fine new cantilevered staircase (very much in the original engineering tradition but one that could not be confused for anything from the 18th century) and a dramatically revived vault that will now act as a shop. The linking of the two staircases also emphasises their purely, and wonderfully, theatrical nature, appearing almost as stage sets.

The zenith, however, is the restored (now LVMH) Great Room, the lofty original Royal Academy space portrayed by Rowlandson with its lantern restored (it had been covered with a false ceiling, the room bizarrely subdivided). Situated directly above the arch to the Strand, it is a superb space, a light, simple cube in which the natural light from the arched openings of the lantern is exactly right — cool and calm. It feels like part of a suite of domestic rooms, but is at the scale of the museum.

It features some of the collection’s most famous pictures, Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”, Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear”, Gauguin’s “Nevermore” and so on. If there is a gripe, it is that two new temporary walls have been built (part of the exhibition design by Nissen Richards Studio) which breaks up the simple, single space. Surely, at least for the opening hang, we could have been allowed to appreciate this revived room in its entirety?

Beyond this space (which feels entirely like a new gallery, so transformed is it) are the Blavatnik Fine Rooms, a suite of six elegant Georgian chambers (the Courtauld’s Rubens works are here) and new galleries dedicated to medieval works, modern works on paper and the Bloomsbury Group. A specially commissioned work by Cecily Brown at the top of the stairs talks across space and time with the epic triptych by Oskar Kokoschka (“The Myth of Prometheus”) now exhibited in the Katja and Nicolai Tangen Galleries.

The display of the Karshan Gift (including works by Twombly, Guston, Richter and others) has shifted the collection’s balance a little closer to the present and it now appears much more contemporary. Nissen Richards’ colour schemes and vitrines are clear, self-effacing and elegant throughout.

There are no architectural acrobatics here, at least not on view, though there are plenty under the skin, from the poured concrete of the vaults to the engineering of the roofs and machinery. Instead Witherford Watson Mann (which won the Stirling Prize in 2013 for its restoration of the ruined Astley Castle) has carefully stitched together the various parts to make something that feels coherent, even if it varies hugely in the scale, decoration and feel of the galleries.

In its details, most of which will probably go unnoticed, that care shines through. Look, for instance, at the floors and you might see that the screw holes trace the odd paths of historic beams and joists running in all directions, delineating diagonals across the space. Then look at the floorboards and you might notice thicker boards in the middle of the room with progressively slimmer timbers towards the walls, a reflection of the original practice of cutting a floor from a single tree and grading the boards from the centre of the room.

These things make a difference. There is a sense here that the building has been handled sensitively, which masks some of the big moves needed to make it coherent, accessible and rewarding. It feels like the return of a beautiful old suit, mended, restitched and with a comfortable, silky new lining. Familiar but fresh.

courtauld.ac.uk/gallery