Stare Case

Yesterday I was taken to see Peter Doig’s large, colourful pictures at the Courtauld. They were OK but not worth the double-digit millions they sometimes fetch at auction.

It’s strange some artists fetch higher prices at auction than from an exhibition at a gallery while most fetch considerably less. A friend has bought good pictures by Nicholas Hely-Hutchinson and Lucy Willis (two living artists whose work I admire) at auction for a fraction of their gallery prices. I noticed almost all the Doigs were from private collections; their spell on the walls in the Strand will do wonders for their value no doubt.

Until 1989 the Courtauld was housed in Woburn Square and I never went, a surprising lacuna as I had been living in London since 1976. The gallery was closed for a thorough refurb 2018 – 2021 and this was my first chance to see if it had been spruced up or fucked up. First and foremost the permanent collection is outstanding and as well displayed as ever. Its relatively small scale and delightful architecture puts me in mind of the Frick in New York. I dragged my eyes away from the pictures, drawings, silver, furniture etc to look at the rooms. They are well proportioned with beautiful plasterwork and frescoes – as you would expect from Sir William Chambers. You will have seen something else he designed, earlier this month: the Gold State Coach used in the Coronation. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy and the centre piece of the north (Strand) wing of Somerset House was the Great Room used for the RA Summer Exhibition, a show that started in 1769.

While the rest of the gallery is a joy to behold whoever calls the shots seems to have lost their bottle over the Great Room. The natural light has been crudely blocked, perhaps to avoid damage from sunlight, and the magnificent space defiled by free-standing partitions allowing more pictures to be hung. You will look in vain for the ceiling painting mimicking the sky and the moulding (the “Line”) around the room. Meanwhile in the basement, open for the first time, there are three spacious rooms entirely used as a shop and an outside area used as a pop-up bar at opening parties.

The other wow! feature designed by Chambers is the spiral staircase up to the third floor Great Room. At the time it was ridiculed, not least by Thomas Rowlandson who called it a Stare Case.

“One of Rowlandson’s most ebullient designs, this etching simultaneously mocks the exhibition-going public and the London art establishment. Visitors eager to view the annual spring exhibition of the Royal Academy struggle to negotiate a steep spiral staircase at Somerset House on the Strand. Beginning in 1780, these displays were held in the Great Room of Sir William Chambers’s grand Neoclassical building, but to reach the galleries, visitors had to climb three long, narrow flights – a challenging approach that Chambers hoped would suggest an ascent to Parnassus. Focusing on the practical difficulties the stairs presented for two-way foot traffic, Rowlandson imagines the cascade produced when a hefty lady trips on a dog, then knocks over her fellow climbers like ninepins, Most of the bodies upended are female, and since women at this date wore no lower undergarments, the general confusion grants nearby males a glimpse of female nudity before they even reach the art. By including the well-known sculptor SIr Joseph Nollekens (at the left, holding up a glass to inspect a fallen beauty), Rowlandson suggests the power of living flesh to trump artistic simulacrums. Even the Callipygian Venus, the classical statue in the niche, whose gaze should be fixed on her own beautiful posterior, has raised her eyes to smile at the human comedy flowing through the idealized setting.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art New York)