Edgar Degas
Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando (1879)
Tate
The name of Samuel Courtauld, who died on December 1947 at the age of seventy-one, will have a distinguished place in the annals of the arts in England. His services were very numerous, including those normal to a man of his prominence and interests, such as Trusteeships of the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery; but two achievements stand out pre-eminently: the securing for the nation, by gifts of money or actual paintings, of an unrivalled selection of the masterpieces of the French Impressionists and the endowment and planning of the Courtauld Institute of Art in the University of London.
The separate gifts from him established the London Galleries as leading centres for the enjoyment of Impressionist art. In 1923 he transferred to a trust fund a sum for the purchase of paintings of a selected list of French artists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The representation of Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Seurat (Une Baignade) in the Tate Gallery was notably enriched by this gift. More personal, because works of his own selection which had hung in his own house, were the pictures which, in 1932, he presented to the Courtauld Institute, and of which many are by his wish on loan to the National Gallery.
TSR Boase
