Courtauld Gallery

Stand in front of Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and you are looking at the painting the Courtauld was built around. A barmaid faces you head-on, and behind her a mirror reflects the crowded music hall and a top-hatted customer, though the reflection sits in the wrong place, a puzzle people have argued over since Manet finished it in 1882, his last major work.

The gallery exists because Samuel Courtauld, who made his fortune in artificial silk, fell hard for French Impressionism in the 1920s, when British taste still found it suspect. He bought boldly and in 1932 gave his collection to found an institute for teaching art history, still one of the leading places in the world to study it.

The result is a small gallery with an outsized wall of famous faces, hung now in the light-filled Great Room of Somerset House. Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear stares out from 1889, the wound fresh. There is Cézanne's Card Players, and works by Seurat, Degas and Gauguin, and the strong sense that you are walking through one sharp-eyed collector's taste rather than a national survey.