The Courtauld Gallery might be relatively small compared to some of London’s other major art institutions, but boy does it punch above its weight. Founded in 1932 by art collector Samuel Courtauld, the gallery boasts a genuinely jaw-dropping collection of paintings and drawings dating from the Middle Ages through to the modern day, with a particularly impressive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
And alongside its magnificent permanent collections, the gallery has a stellar reputation when it comes to its programme of temporary exhibitions, with recent hits including Goya To Impressionism, Monet and London and Frank Auerbach’s ‘The Charcoal Heads’. It’s no surprise, then, that the Courtauld’s newly announced 2026 exhibition programme looks thoroughly exciting, featuring a major neo-impressionist, an icon of British modernist sculpture and the first European show of a contemporary American talent.
The 2026 season kicks off with A View of One’s Own (Jan 28-Jun 14), an exhibition exploring the oft-overlooked contributions of female artists to Britain’s golden era of landscape painting. Showcasing watercolours and drawings created between 1760 and 1860, the exhibition features ten artists ranging from accomplished amateurs to those ambitious for recognition, including Harriet Lister, Mary Lowther, Amelia Long and Elizabeth Batty.
February sees the long-awaited opening of the already-announced Seurat and the Sea (Feb 25-May 17), the first UK exhibition on the French post-impressionist Georges Seurat for 30 years. One of the major artists to champion pointillism, Seurat painted dozens of seascapes during his short life, and this show will bring together more than 20 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made during the five summers he spent on France’s northern coast prior to his death in 1891, aged 31.
Then, over the summer months, the gallery will host Hepworth in Colour (June 2-Sept 6), an exploration of British modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s use of colour. Best known for her abstract works inspired by natural landscapes, Hepworth also exhibited a lifelong fascination with colour, and this exhibition will unite around 20 sculptures and 30 drawings spanning from her early work in the 1940s to major pieces from the 1950s and 60s.
Opening alongside this is Studio Prints: An Artists’ Workshop (June 6-Sept 13), a display of prints by major artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego, celebrating the legacy of a little-known printmaking workshop founded by Dorothea Wight in 1968 as printmaking underwent a resurgence in popularity during the 1960s and 70s.
Finally, autumn 2026 sees the Courtauld stage Salman Toor: Someone Like You (Oct 2-Jan 10 2027), a first solo European exhibition for the Pakistani-American figurative painter’. Toor’s arrival at the gallery follows the New York-based artist’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 and participation in the 2024 Biennale di Venezia, and will feature around 20 of the artist’s thought-provoking and humorous paintings exploring queer and immigrant lives, alongside some of his earlier drawings.
Alongside these major exhibitions, the gallery will host several smaller displays in its exhibition space, including The Painted Tower: Conservation in Context at Longthorpe (Feb 27-May 27) exploring the Courtauld’s collaboration with English Heritage on the conservation of a series of fourteenth-century wall paintings in Peterborough’s Longthorpe Tower, Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs (Jun 6-Oct 4), a series of photographs documenting the lively environment of the London studio shared by Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the English painter Ben Nicholson, in the 1930s, and Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer (Oct 14-Feb 10 2027), spotlighting the designer craftswoman who was a key figure of the Bloomsbury Set’s design studio Omega Workshops.
More details on all of the newly announced exhibitions can be found here, with tickets for Seurat and the Sea already on sale here. If you’ve let your Courtauld membership lapse, you might want to renew it now, because that’s an incredible year of brilliant art to get through.
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