Enfilade

Now on view at The Courtauld:

The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection

The Courtauld Gallery, London, 23 May 2025 — 28 Jun 2026

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Countess Golovine, ca. 1800, oil on canvas, 84 × 67 cm (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 80.1).

A selection of exceptional paintings from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, is on view at The Courtauld Gallery for an extended display from May 2025, while the Barber undergoes a major refurbishment project. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts was founded as a university gallery in 1932, the same year as The Courtauld Institute of Art and its collection. Both were intended to encourage the study and public appreciation of art. Today, the Barber and The Courtauld Gallery are home to two of the finest collections of European art in the country.

Highlights from the collection at the Barber include important works such as Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (c. 1610–14), Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Countess Golovina (1797–1800), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower (1865), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman in a Garden (1890). In addition, a handful of paintings with strong links to The Courtauld’s own collection will be embedded in the permanent collection displays, among them Joshua Reynolds’s monumental double portrait Maria Marow Gideon and Her Brother William (1786–87).