Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Courtauld Gallery are brought together at the National Gallery with paintings from both collections by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The authors discuss iconic paintings such as Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Cézanne’s Card Players, and explore the fascinating story of the formation of the Courtauld collection. For its founder, the industrialist Samuel Courtauld, it was a deeply felt and personal lifelong ambition that these great pictures should be seen and enjoyed by the widest possible public; and his creation of a £50,000 purchase fund for the Tate and the National Gallery helped to lay the foundations of Britain’s national collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.