‘It’s too much!’ – the Courtauld’s Van Goghs, Monets, Cézannes, Goyas and Bruegels are reborn

The first time I visited the Courtauld Gallery, I managed to spill paint on the floor in front of Claude Monet’s 1873 Autumn Effect at Argenteuil. Almost 100 years after Monet painted this placid but flaring river scene, the young Searle was perpetrating his own autumn effect on the gallery floor. In the early 1970s, the Courtauld was housed on the top floor of a building on Bloomsbury’s Woburn Square, part of the University of London, and art students were still given dispensation to copy the works, although thankfully few were as messy as me.

Fifty years later, on the top floor of the newly remodelled and renovated Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, which reopens to the public on 19 November