'Millet, Life on the Land' (National Gallery until October 19 2025)

Jean-François Millet, The Wood Sawyers, c.1851, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It has been a very long time since the last exhibition dedicated to Jean-François Millet and I suppose that is reason enough to welcome the National Gallery’s Life on the Land. The current show is, however, a meagre affair, built around the admittedly substantial coup of the Angelus loaned from the Musée d'Orsay, but without depth or substance. One room and a handful of works does not lend itself to a successful survey of a prolific artist who had a thirty year career. Equally, Life on the Land is simply too broad a title and ambition. A better show would have been more focused, perhaps on the central theme of the Angelus - faith - or, even more conducive to a contemporary audience, Millet's clear gendering. One can see that the curators wanted to include the National's own Winnower but they miss the opportunity afforded by the available works to construct an interesting narrative around action and stillness. As it is, a disparate selection of seemingly random pieces (anything they National could acquire from British museums) are not given enough cohesion and simply left this viewer wanting more.

Millet is unfashionable and problematic for 21st century tastes, hardly surprising when one considers that even his contemporaries didn’t really know what to make of him. One time posterboy of the 1848 radicals: the Winnower was bought by member of the short-lived Republican government, he became the darling of conservatives who saw his religious, stoic peasantry as the reliable backbone of France. A victim of his own mythologising, he was labelled the 'peasant painter' by his first biographer, Alfred Sensier: the Normandy lad who made good in Paris but never really left the land. Ever since, writers have felt compelled to debunk that version: Millet was aloof from his Barbizon neighbours, he read Virgil, he didn’t attend church, even to marry. Whatever the unknowable truth, he represented the rural poor with a commitment, clarity and earnestness which no other 19th century French artist could match. He had none of Courbet's in-your-face stridency nor, even in his milkmaids and goose girls, the saccharine academicism of Jules Breton. Only Jules Bastien Lepage comes close, imbuing his chunkily awkward figures with a pallid clarity which does little to disguise his debt to the older artist.

Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-9, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Arguably Millet carried on resolutely doing the same thing whilst the world shifted and French politics whirled around him. In that sense he was a painters' painter, beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, and all the politicised readings miss the point. Millet's canvases are like a rich winter stew, complex and layered, warmly satisfying even when composed of the most mundane ingredients. They are hearty in a literal sense, creating a meaningful connection across time and space with figures who are not only beyond our experience, but, largely featureless and introverted, defiant in their disconnection from us. In the absence of detail, of expression, of eye contact, he achieves an emotional bridge though brushwork and colour. You are in the barn with the Winnower , dust catching in your throat, feeling the effort in his back, the scratch of the straw in his sabots, the subtle power of a grip which can flick up the basket with practiced precision. In the same way you can hear the Angelus bell, perhaps with the impatience some have read into the man's twirling of his cap, perhaps ominously -  Dali imagined a grave in the foreground - perhaps elegiacally with the sunset. 

What the exhibition does provide are examples of Millet's drawings, energised, vigorous and gestural in their determination to capture the reality of pose and movement. There is much speculation about whether these were done on location, or from posed studio models: I suspect a combination of the two. It seems of little consequence when the intention is so clear. Millet laboured to represent labour because it mattered, a case of basic survival for women bent double with the burden of scraggly twigs which one imagines would burn within moments, for girls old beyond their years charged with watching geese or sheep, for landless men earning a pittance or a couple grateful for their scrap of earth. He had been there and the reality of what he saw in Barbizon was so overlaid with Millet's own memories of childhood that the paint soaked up his empathy and understanding. In that sense I find him akin to Constable, another artist whose deep affinity with the agricultural countryside is misunderstood today.

The National Gallery exhibition might be a missed opportunity (it is for instance far less successful than their similarly sized show about the Haywain) but it reminds us why Millet was so popular and why he remains so compelling. It’s not about politics or religion; it’s not, as Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian seems to think, about sex. It's not about realism either. Millet was an old romantic. It’s all about love. Love of the land and love of his materials. Stand close and relish the gnarly brushwork and the writhing lines and the unctuous, oozing colour. One room is as paltry as the stoney ground Millet so often portrays but even here you can glean so much.

'The Edwardians: Age of Elegance' (King's Picture Gallery until November 23 2025): All that Glitters

Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia), 1859, Royal Collection Trust

Last year the Royal Collection Trust gave us the Georgians, this year, the Edwardians, a rather more amorphous title which encompasses a significant amount of Victoria's reign (from the Prince of Wales' marriage in 1863) and slides well beyond Edward VII's death to a finishing point after the end of the First World War. It is definitely a show to please the summer tourists, with an eclectic mix of gifts, jewellery and costume alongside fine art and photography. The emphasis is on objects and their stories, rather than fine art, and the quality of some of the paintings might be called into question - Laurits Tuxen particularly is over-represented and under-performs.  However, with a busy display which makes the most of the space available, plenty of anecdotes and a free audio guide, there is always something to interest, even as you find yourself deploring the extravagance.

The curators make little effort to counterbalance all the glitter. History is a passing annoyance and the dynastic complexities of the British royal family are never really explained. There are multiple, multi-figured canvases where a guide to the characters involved would have been helpful; even a basic family tree. A scene-setting drawing room gathering contains the figure of Albert Victor, mentioned without explanation in the caption, yet surely only the most ardent royalist would know him to be Edward VII's eldest son, soon to die of pneumonia. In a small, sunny image of 1911, George V and the Kaiser take the salute together at the opening of the Victoria Memorial - a poignant enough image given that three years later they would be opposing sides, but specifically why Wilhelm is there is not discussed. Empire and international relations are passing excuses for presentation gifts rather than the subject of interrogation. You long for surfaces to be scratched.

Edward himself remains a mystery: his gambling and womanising are simply ignored apart from the most oblique of asides: images of favorite race horses and his collection of photographs of actresses and singers, displayed as one side of a folding screen, well away from the generals and politicians. A man who could not even be bothered to stand for his coronation portrait by Luke Fildes, he preferred suits to military uniform and enjoyed fancy dress. In the most extraordinary image, Jules Bastien Lepage, better known as a portrayer of peasant poverty, shows him as Renaissance ruler in front of a tapestry-like Thames. 

Laurits Tuxen, The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887, 1887, Royal Collection Trust

Alexandra seems to become more elongated with each passing year, famous for her tiny waist and swan-like neck, a succession of flashy society portraitists fail to reveal more. She becomes more rounded through her possessions, a love - perhaps homesickness - for her Danish homeland which does not seem to fade and her genuine enthusiasm for photography. If Edward and Alexandra are sketchy, George V barely gets a walk-on part. A small John Lavery study for his 1913 group portrait of the royal family is labelled to suggest that dullness, duty and an impending sense of doom had already overtaken the king. Equally, one might argue, it was Lavery's preferred palette. The intriguing figure here, and intermittently throughout is that of the future Edward VIII, delicately blonde and boyish. In a Sargent drawing from 1920, he seems unnaturally young - a twenty-six year old schoolboy who has served in a war.  

Amongst the royal watching, the tea-sets and dinner services, the silverware and exotic gifts, you can overlook the art. Some pieces are old friends: Alfred Gilbert's Icarus, a sleekly sensuous reinterpretation of Donatello's David weighed down by his wings; three beautiful, individually distinctive Burne-Jones drawings; a small, slice of Mediterranean blue from Alma-Tadema. Gustave Doré's Wood Nymph, luminous amid dense, dark, greenery, is a surprise for those more familiar with his graphic work. Leighton was clearly a royal favourite: his Nanna (Pavonia) has a sultry sensuality despite the artist's usual impassive surface. Edward chose Nanna; in contrast, Guthrie's tiny, smudged and almost sky-less landscape was a gift, and one suspects an under-appreciated one. 

Ultimately there is little substance to the Edwardians. It is all surface and show. Even the downbeat, final room, with its sombre march past the newly unveiled cenotaph, does little to tarnish the glitter. The Edwardian era is often misrepresented as a long elegiac summer; here it is a brash, flash party. The original glitterati. You might be impressed, but it is difficult to feel anything but emptiness.

'Sussex Modernism' (Towner Eastbourne, until September 28 2025): Magical Modernist Mystery Tour

Ivon Hitches, Day's Rest, Day's Work, 1960, Sussex University © the artist's estate

Sussex Modernism feels like an oxymoron. The counties - rural, rolling, coastal, chalky - have a determinedly timeless provincial appeal. The well-known art they generated in the twentieth century from the washed-out greens of Eric Ravilious to the middle-class flowers and furnishings of the Charleston set are safe and back-waterish. You might think of Ditching and then decide to unthink it as the name Eric Gill hovers into your mind. The Towner curators are determined bring the two words together, by sticking with admirable rigidity to their location and, perhaps less successfully, by bombarding their visitors with a wealth of examples from the late nineteenth century through to the present day, defining Modernism very much as an extended time period rather than a set of values. Curator Hope Wolf has talked about modernisms in the plural and perhaps that would have been a better title, justifying the range of styles she choses to display. This is an exhibition which leaves no stone unturned: generous, inclusive and inventive in its juxtaposition of objects, media and makers.

The Vorticist magazine is a literal Blast in the centre of the first room around which swirls a disparate selection of works. LS Lowry is here, incongruously, with a windmill, Ravilious too, alongside Edward Wadsworth, who sits more comfortably within the modernist canon.  Gluck is represented by one of their huge-skied landscapes, peacefully serene and empty, and there are less familiar names: Peggy Angus, whose view of cement works is as pallid as if covered with a dusting of the stuff and Margaret Benecke's icily abstracted Glacier Forms. This first display sets the tone, both in its range of materials - including ceramics - and the focus on overlooked, regional figures. The second room delves deeper into that regionalism, acknowledging the sisters who established a modernist gallery in Lewes (here painted by Cedric Morris) and Mary Stormont, a founder-member of Rye Art Club.

Amy Sawyer, Gentle Spring Brings
Her Garden Stuff to Market, 1896,
Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth 

Modernism proper comes into the equation with the Ditching-focused display: Jacob Epstein's sculpture and Ethel Mairet's textiles, jazzily displayed against blue, with Ivon Hitchen's dramatic polyptych and William Gear's Vertical Feature popping exuberantly off the wall. Yet this is modernism undercut by magic, mythology and romanticism, and the same is true as you confront four female figures against their blood-red background. Amy Sawyer, Jennifer Binnie, Edward Burne Jones and Alexi Marshall's works are not set-up in opposition to each other, but rather in a sisterly solidarity which coheres the disparate styles and collapses a century of change. It is one of the best hangs I've seen in long time. Before that we have gone into full 'Season of the Witch' territory with darkly trippy landscapes by Carlyle Brown and Pavel Tchelitchew.

The final room shifts mood, from elegy to energy with the Pop Art vibe of Jeff Keen's LAFF, the dynamic co-operatism given off by two panels of the Eastbourne International Workers' Mural and the future-now optimism of László Moholy-Nagy's Pavilion Bexhill on Sea. Edward Burra did his share of eerie, empty landscapes but is here represented by jokey, jazzy etchings and the exhibition ends with pop and popular - Sophie Barber's Kendrick on his Way Back from Camber Sands. This is not the triumph of the new, however, and the introspective, retrospective mood lingers with Julian Bell carrying on the family name and David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes channelling that same restless, rural oddity. 

Bowie's video is just one of several film pieces and the great achievement of Sussex Modernism is not just the range of media but the successful integration of the display. Strict chronology or theme are eschewed in favour of aesthetic considerations as the curators invite you to enjoy the art, setting up sight-lines, and formal and colour juxtapositions which enhance and elucidate. Whether this is art which is unique to Sussex, I am not sure: Neo Romanticism is a broad movement in 20th century Britain and the curators themselves acknowledge the impossibility of tying artists to specific regions. More problematically, the label of 'modernism' is at the very least disingenuous and constrictive. As Philip Hoare's recent book William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love demonstrates, these artists trace a lineage back not just to the late 18th century, but to folk traditions and prehistoric forms. Whilst I can applaud the curators' desire to deconstruct the term, and create a user-friendly title to advertise their show, it is arguably much better to forget it the moment you enter the exhibition. Modernism condemned British artists to a backwater, this show proves that they should be mainstream.

Sand, Sea and Sculpture

Antony Gormley, Another Place, Crosby Beach (WikiCommons)

In 2005 Antony Gormley’s one hundred life-sized cast-iron figures were erected on Crosby Beach, Merseyside. Initially, a temporary installation, which had already been exhibited in Norway, Belgium and Germany, the local council agreed make their presence permanent in 2007. Another Place, or the Iron Men as they are affectionately known, has become a major tourist attraction and is perhaps the best known example of seaside sculpture. But all along the British coast, holiday resorts have turned to art to bring in visitors and put themselves on the map.

Some coastal towns have long established artistic connections. In the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of painting plein air (outside), ‘colonies’ of artists decamped to the coast, where living was cheap, the light was pure and traditional subjects abounded. Places as far afield as Newlyn in Cornwall and Cockburnspath, south of Edinburgh, became home to artists, art schools and exhibition societies, and many still trade on that tradition today. St Ives was probably the most famous of them all, home to successive generations of artists including Marianne Stokes, Laura Knight and Barbara Hepworth. It now boasts not only a museum dedicated to Hepworth but Tate St Ives which sits right on the beach: there is literally sculpture everywhere.

Not surprisingly the success of Tate St Ives has led other seaside towns to follow suit. Margate built the Turner Contemporary on the site of the boarding house frequented by the great nineteenth century landscapist, JMW Turner, who was a regular visitor to the town. Local artist Ann Carrington’s Mrs Booth, Shell Lady monumentalises a tourist souvenir in twelve foot high bronze and names her after Turner’s landlady. In theory, Mrs Booth is an ideal seaside sculpture – relevant, engaging and populist – although the reality is that she seems forlornly marooned at the end of the harbour. Morecambe similarly, but more successfully, gives pride of place, not to past mayors or benefactors, but to its famous namesake, comedian Eric Morecambe. His statue, plinth-less and approachable, brings sunshine and smiles as he dances in an ungainly action pose on the seafront.

Like Margate, Bexhill on Sea invested in culture by redeveloping their 1935 Art Deco De La Warr Pavilion as an arts centre in 2005. They always have contemporary sculpture on show outside, at present Tschabalala Self’s Seated. Self’s larger-than-life polychromatic bronze of a black female figure turning in her chair, exemplifies a different approach to seaside sculpture. Neither the artist nor the work has any direct relevance to the town or the coastal location, but it is hoped the presence of the work itself (even though it might be controversial) will attract visitors. Seated was vandalised in 2023, an event which made the national press and led to huge numbers of local volunteer cleaners. Damien Hirst’s Verity has been on long-term loan to Ilfracombe since 2012: the stainless steel, heavily pregnant woman, skin partly flayed to reveal her internal organs, is the ultimate marmite sculpture, loved and loathed in equal measure. One thing it does prove is that size isn’t everything. Verity, including her raised sword, stands over twenty metres tall and dwarfs the harbour, making it look like Toy Town.

Most towns play it safer. Newlyn promenade is dominated by a three metre high figure of a fisherman poised on the act of casting a rope. Commissioned from a local artist, Tom Leaper, and focussing on the traditional industry of the town, this sets itself apart from hundreds of similar pieces by the solid force of its presence. On one hand it is a traditional memorial, commemorating fishermen lost at sea, but it also cleverly channels the spirit of the nineteenth-century artists, like Stanhope Forbes, who put Newlyn on the map. This is ordinary man made heroic. Tintagel’s Gallos also successfully suffuses culture and location. The shredded, hollowed-out figure of a knight, stands sentry-like on cliffs by King Arthur’s legendary castle. Despite the scale (2.4m) and solidity of the bronze, the work feels both ancient and fragile, only half present, like the myth itself, and as eroded as the rocks around it. That relationship between sculpture and surroundings, also achieved by Gormley’s Iron Men, is one of the keys to creating a successful seaside sculpture.

Non-figurative works can be just as involving. The most famous example is probably Maggi Hambling’s 2003 memorial to Benjamin Britten, Scallop, which rises directly out of the shingle on the beach at Aldeburgh. Subject to repeated vandalism and campaigns to have it removed, it is a work which has to be experienced in the round and in situ, where it becomes less a representation of a shell and more a series of interesting forms and silhouettes against sky and sea. At Cleveleys in Lancashire, a huge stainless steel spiral conch, Mary’s Shell, sits on the sand, submerged at high tide and big enough to walk inside. The shell is part of a sculpture trail based on local legends, but its real strength is the interaction between installation and environment, with the waves creating a soundscape as they meet the structure, barnacles and limpets colonising it, and the sand shifting around. This is surely the aim of any beach sculpture – to be distinctive yet also to integrate into its surroundings.

There are thousands of sculptures and hundreds of sculpture trails along the length of the British coast. Most are not memorable enough to draw visitors in their own right. Many are not significant works of art. Plenty have been derided by critics and opposed by the local population. Even when seaside sculpture does succeed, it cannot in itself bring regeneration and wealth: Margate still contains some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, despite increased visitors and a cachet of ‘coolness’ associated with the Turner Contemporary. Yet, when an artwork does strike a chord either because of its local associations or its visual impact, it can really put somewhere on the map. Another Place has transformed Crosby Beach into a tourist destination. Thanks to Gormley's Iron Men there is no other place like it.

This is a version of an article which first appeared in Erato Magazine in July 2024

'That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta' (Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham until November 2 2025): Not Feeling It

Stanley Spencer, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, 1952-9 (private collection) © the estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: Stanley Spencer Gallery

Stanley Spencer's last great vision, nearly half of which remains nothing more than a tantalising spider's web of pencil lines, is the centrepiece of the current exhibition at the Cookham gallery dedicated to his work. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta was in Spencer's words conceived as an image of love. His love for a place, his love of god, his love of life. The problem was life kept getting in the way. Finally fashionable, readmitted to the Royal Academy (from which Spencer had resigned over rejected paintings in 1935), and permanently in need on money, Spencer found himself distracted by demands for portraits. God was not on his side either: cancer required an operation and extended recuperation. For a poorly, near- 70 year old, employing painstaking precision, precariously perched atop a stool on 3a table, and faced with a canvas so large it was permanently partly rolled up, the task must have seemed all but impossible. Spencer was a man of details, never inclined to see the big picture and other distractions were of his own making - fleshed out scenes like Dinner on the Hotel Lawn which never made it into the final composition were still lovingly worked through. 

Christ Preaching as it stands is thus both poignant and frustrating. And the same could be said of the exhibition. The Spencer Gallery may not be the smallest in the UK but it's not far off. Just a single room with mezzanine, it feels churlish to begrudge them the £7 entrance fee and their marvellous little open access library and archives, not to mention their extensive holdings of Spencer's work, certainly warrant a bigger venue. This exhibition is well curated by Amy Lim and others and comes with its own slim catalogue. The wall texts and labelling although slightly repetitive cover the Regatta, Spencer's life and links to Cookham and the development of Christ Preaching. They have on loan two lovely Victorian interpretations. one of Edward Gregory's studies for Boulter's Lock has a deliciously thick marmalade-y colour; Hector Caffieri's Going to Cookham Lock is all delicate fluff. Good primary sources show champion women punters and evoke the crowds. 

Stanley Spencer, The Last Supper, 1920, Stanley Spencer Gallery, © the estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: Stanley Spencer Gallery

Spencer's preparatory works from small soft chalk scribbles to crisp pencil precision dominate the ground floor of the exhibition. They are fascinating enough to warrant more space, both in terms of method and of the developing final image. Hung as they are beneath the final canvas, you have to strain upwards to see how they connect: Christ Preaching is really too large for the wall, only really visible by standing awkwardly on the stairs. Paintings from the collection add context: portraits, landscapes, bathers, frustratingly random, and in some cases disappointingly bland. Spencer is at his best cataloguing life's oddness, not representing aldermen and vicar's wives. He was also increasingly obsessed with detail at the expense of composition and form with the late works, his jaunty cherry and green palette veering towards Beryl Cook-like caricature (his work will feature in an exhibition of Cook's work at The Box, Plymouth, next year). The Last Supper, all malt brown and wriggling toes, stands out amongst the later works on show for its austere repetition.

Spencer's never-realised Church House project, which he envisaged including the Last Supper, the Baptism (here represented by a drawing which depicts a seated Christ surrounded by joyous fish) and Christ Preaching, receives only the briefest mention. I can't help thinking this would have made for a better exhibition. Alternatively, a focus on Christ Preaching, which despite the exhibition's slightly misleading title, is definitely the star of this show, would allow the preparatory works the focus they deserve. An even braver choice, might have ditched the large canvas entirely and focused instead on the regatta and Spencer's nostalgic love of Cookham. The real problem, you suspect, is curators whose ideas - and an artist whose works - deserve more space. To feel the marvellous atmosphere of Spencer's work you have to be immersed in it (as you can be at Burghclere Chapel). That is hard enough in the context of an unfinished canvas, but here the high hang, diffuse curation and above a micro-venue act as unnecessary extra barriers. 

Anselm Kiefer: Early Works (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until June 15 2025)

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat (Whoever has no House now), 2023Emulsion, acrylic, oil, shellac, lead, string and chalk on canvas, 190 x 330 cm Collection of the artist. Courtesy of White Cube. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet

Huge, multi-media encrustations, apocalyptic installations: now in his eightieth year, Anselm Kiefer has become an established behemoth, internationally recognised for his mature style of lyrical destruction. Oxford's Ashmolean brings us the origin story, the 'Complete Unknown' of an angry young man, searching for answers in art and history. The result is uneven, to be sure, but also compelling. It's not a big show but it's not afraid to ask big questions and to accept that the answers are either impossibly complex or deeply unsettling. 

Before all that, however, you come face to face with three near-contemporary works. Two elegiac, autumnal reflections on Rilke's poetry, softly red and orange, leaves falling from their surfaces, generate a dreamy serenity. In the centre, the third piece, looms darker, autumn seems to have shifted to night. It is only when you approach, and figures emerge, fleeing, faceless, and the discrete label Whoever Has no House Now catches your eye, that you are drawn into their nightmare. Then the silvered leaves become fallen shrapnel and mellow fruitfulness, explosive fire. 

If you can move on - and it takes a lot - the next display drops back fifty or so years. A different time, a different place, but the angry incomprehension which torments the surface of Kiefer's recent canvases is immediately, vividly present. Here is the young man creating a mock-swagger self portrait dressed in his father's Wehrmacht uniform; giving a banned Nazi salute to countryside sliced through with barbed wire; repurposing Second World War propaganda images. Anything to force a conversation about things Germany would rather have kept quiet about. There's anger, there's brazen defiance and there's nothing subtle about it. 

The young Kiefer is a man in search of a style. He borrows heavily, from Weimar Expressionists like Dix and Beckmann, from the strong tonality and heavy impasto of Kokoschka, from Nolde and Kollwitz woodcuts. He rifles through German and Nordic history and mythology, from Arminius in the forest through to Wagner. He riffs off popular culture - magazines and teach yourself art books. Amidst all the heavy-handedness there is delicacy: small watercolours, a curation of lilac-y landscapes, winged palettes that suggest fleeting optimism. Equally, you sense the development from scattergun rage to an older, wiser, sniper-accurate subtlety. Kiefer is often portrayed as an artist of bombast, too over-sized and over-loaded, but really he is a master of understatement and detail. His works nag at your mind, pulling threads of reference and meaning, so layered and knotted that you can't dismiss them, can't forget them. He is still the young man standing in the countryside demanding a reckoning.

'Goya To Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection' (Courtauld until May 26 2025): 'Now That's What I Call Art....'

Francisco Goya, Still Life - Three Salmon Steaks, 1808-12, Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Compilation albums are always a bit soulless - full of great tracks but never quite the sum of the their parts. So it proves at the Courtauld where the curators have cherry-picked some of the best nineteenth century paintings from the Oskar Reinhart collection in Switzerland and created a 'Now that's what I call Art...' In many ways it is a marriage made in heaven - Samuel Courtauld and Reinhart were mirror images, both industrial philanthropists and art lovers who gifted their respective collections to the public, and actually met. It is also very definitely a marriage of convenience - the Reinhart collection is currently mothballed as its museum location gets a facelift and no institution can resist the marketing lure of Impressionism. (The pendant in me balks at the tacit description of Van Gogh, Lautrec and Picasso as Impressionist). The curators pay lip-service to giving this show a theme: ostensibly it has a narrative in which Goya is the father of modern art, but this is never told with any great conviction in the labelling, or in the choice of works (you sense they came first and the argument followed to fit). Equally, the Courtauld-Reinhart links, which are interesting, are not really exploited. Instead of integrating the two collections - which would have admittedly required more effort and cost - you are simply told to clock parallel paintings on your way out.

It all starts so well. On one wall, Goya's three salmon steaks leer menacingly and Gericault's Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank stares skyward in plaintiff bewilderment. It is impossible to look away and the more you stare back, the more these works draw you into their haunted interiors. Goya's salmon are like the sinister sister skull of Holbein's Ambassadors, oblique, eyeless and open mouthed in a silent scream. Or perhaps the discarded mask of a carnival clown. His ketchup blood, like that in the Third of May, is an unnecessary horror and yet also the painting's final potency. It is the memories of Goya's implied conflict which haunt Gericault's soldier, his face, too, shadowed and starved into a portending skull. Here, also, red - a noose-like tassell - is the final, terrible flourish. Madness hangs in the air. But if these two paintings are the starting point, where do they lead? The next still life one sees is a bland, floral oversized Renoir. The bleak, understated monochrome is mirrored across the room in Cezanne's early portrait of Dominique Aubert, yet here paint is trowelled on, a barrier rather than a vehicle to empathy. It is not until Van Gogh's acidic, alienting hospital ward in the next room, that anything packs the same emotional punch.

Vincent van Gogh, Ward in a Hospital in Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Renoir. There are always some filler tracks on a compilation album, but three very similar Renoirs in a row is a problem, unless you are a devotee, as Reinhart obviously was and I am not. Unevenness dogs the whole show - and it is not a big enough show to hide it - so, alongside the rough, foaming power of Courbet's seascape you have a soft-porn, studio-lit, Ingres-necked model besporting herself in The Hammock. It is particularly queasy opposite the quiet dignity of Corot's Girl Reading. Monet's masterful evocation of ice on the Seine is one of those paintings which captures you across a room and becomes a completely different, arguably even better, picture close up. Eerily calm reflections zig zag in juxtaposition with the textured solidity of the chunks of ice. Monochrome misted chill disguises a complexity of colour. Next to it, Sisley is just too easy to ignore. The Monet, arguably, lessens everyone else in the room. Manet's Au Cafe, which I've always rather liked, seemed like an awkward collection of missteps and inconsistencies. Both it and the Lautrec next door are best viewed from a distance, across a crowded room, as the captured slices of life they purport to be. 

Goya to the Impressionists is disappointing only because it sets expectations high. There are pictures which would be worth the entrance fee on their own, and with the odd exception, all the works are pretty classy. You can't really complain about an exhibition which offers three great Cezannes in a row, or brings you such an unexpected Van Gogh. In both cases London has been recently spoilt by large exhibitions but these works still feel fresh. But a great show needs more than great art and the curatorial heart here is hollow. It feels like such a missed opportunity, for instance, not to have tried to unite Au Cafe with its other half from across town at the National Gallery, (especially as the latter was purchased with Courtauld money) or failing that, hang it next to the Bar at the Folies Bergere. It is almost criminal to have two Daumier Don Quixotes literally on either side of a wall and not actually hang them together. Like the Daumiers, this exhibition feels like the unfinished ghost of something great.