VIDEO: WATCH SKY ARTS AT THE COURTAULD GALLERY >>

The Courtauld Institute of Art is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of the history and conservation of art and architecture, and its Gallery houses one of Britain’s best-loved collections. Based at Somerset House, it recently celebrated its 75th birthday, which included successful exhibitions on Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Nudes, Renoir’s La Loge, and the Courtauld’s Cézannes. With a new Turner Watercolour exhibition recently unveiled and a range of other projects in the pipeline, Sky Arts went behind the scenes to find out about the singular work that goes on there.

Many of the world’s most famous masterpieces are on show at the Courtauld, from Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to countless Monets, Cézannes, a wonderful Modigliani nude and Van Gogh infamous Self-portrait with bandaged ear.

The gallery is the result of the inspiration of three far-sighted individuals, textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, civil servant and politician Arthur, Lord Lee of Fareham and lawyer Sir Robert Witt. Its collection now numbers some 520 paintings, 7,000 drawings, 20,000 prints and over 550 works of decorative art and sculpture.

Sky Arts spent two days meeting the curators, directors and conservators who work there. Joanna Selborne is curator of Paths to Fame, a new exhibition on Turner’s Watercolours. The work in the collection traces his entrepreneurial approach and spans the artist’s career from important early landscapes made when he was a teenager to the monumental highly finished watercolours of his maturity and his celebrated expressive late works. Perhaps the prized piece in this exhibition is The Dawn of the Wreck, a powerfully evocative watercolour immortalised by John Ruskin, the art critic and illustrious champion of Turner, who interpreted the scene as an elegiac lament on the destructive powers of the sea.

We also get access to the galleries painting store, where we see Degas’s Two Dancers on Stage being carefully unwrapped and examined. And meet Stephanie Buck who discusses an upcoming exhibition surrounding Michelangelo’s 1533 masterpiece, The Dream of Human Life.

To find out more about the Courtauld Institute of Art, visit www.courtauld.ac.uk