Two-year transformation, starting next summer, will open up the London gallery’s historic Great Room
The Courtauld Institute of Art is to close its prestigious gallery for at least two years next summer, as it embarks on a £50m redevelopment. A highlight of the project will be opening up the Great Room to provide a dramatic space for Samuel Courtauld’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, which includes Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore (1897). The historic room, which housed the summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts until 1837, is London’s earliest surviving purpose-built art gallery.