Courtauld, Samuel

Courtauld, Samuel (b Braintree, Essex, 7 May 1876; d London, 1 Dec. 1947). British industrialist, collector, and philanthropist. He came from a family of prosperous silk merchants and was chairman of the textile firm Courtaulds Ltd. from 1921 to 1946. He began collecting in 1922, buying mainly Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and in 1923 he gave the Tate Gallery £50,000 for the purchase of French paintings in his own area of interest (which was poorly represented). This fund was used to buy 23 paintings over the next few years, transforming the Tate's collection (most of the pictures have subsequently been transferred to the National Gallery). His interests also extended to living artists, and in 1925 he joined his friend Maynard Keynes (see Bloomsbury Group) in founding the London Artists' Association to provide financial assistance to young painters and sculptors.

In 1931 came his most famous benefaction when he endowed the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Britain's first specialist centre for the study of the history of art. The Institute opened in 1932 and in the same year Courtauld presented most of his collection to the University of London, together with funds for a building to house them. The co-founders of the Institute were Lord Lee of Fareham (1868–1947), a soldier and politician, who in 1921 had presented his country house—Chequers—to the nation to be the prime minister's country residence, and Sir Robert Witt (1872–1952), a lawyer who formed a library of reproductions of paintings and drawings that is now one of the cornerstones of the Institute's pre-eminence in art-historical studies. Both men left collections to the Courtauld Institute—Lee mainly of paintings, Witt of drawings and watercolours—and there have been several other important bequests, including that of the painter and critic Roger Fry. The most recent of the major bequests, that of the Anglo-Austrian art historian Count Antoine Seilern (1901–78) in 1978, raised an already outstanding collection to new heights. Seilern's bequest is varied, reflecting his own scholarly interests, but its chief glory is its superlative group of works by Rubens. The Institute was originally located in Courtauld's former house at 20 Portman Square (a fine 18th-century building by James Wyatt and Robert Adam), while the galleries (opened in 1958) occupied a building about a mile away, next to the Warburg Institute in Woburn Square. In 1989–90, however, all the Institute's activities and collections were brought together under one roof at Somerset House in the Strand, fulfilling Courtauld's intention that students should work in intimate contact with original works of art.

Kenneth Clark described Courtauld as a ‘quiet modest man…a man of principle, if ever there was one’, and Dennis Farr writes that ‘He brought to his collecting that combination of flair, energy, and sense of public duty that had marked his successful career as a leading industrialist. He did not seek to acquire social status by virtue of his collecting. Indeed, he refused a peerage in the 1937 Coronation Honours List, preferring to keep his independence and integrity’ (Impressionist & Post-Impressionist Masterpieces: The Courtauld Collection, 1987). Courtauld himself said that art was ‘religion's next-of-kin’.