The artists’ artists: how the masters collected their rivals

ARTS CORRESPONDENT THE personal tastes of the world’s most famous artists are to be revealed in a new National Gallery exhibition that shows how they secretly collected rivals’ work to keep an eye on the competition.

The exhibition, opening in London next week, will match paintings including those of Freud, Matisse, Reynolds, Leighton, Degas and Van Dyck with their personal art collections.

As well as showing off their tastes, the show will reveal complex rivalries that provide a unique insight into who was keeping track of whom.

Matisse’s collection includes one work by Picasso, representing a famous rivalry during which the pair sent one another paintings which left both “much concerned about, if not threatened by, each other’s genius”.

Living with two portraits of Dora Maar, a curator said, left Matisse “constantly reminded of Picasso’s challenge”.

The exhibition was inspired by a painting from the collection of Lucian Freud, Corot’s which was given to the gallery after his death in 2011.

It will feature 85 works, half from the National Gallery and half from private collections and institutions around the world.

It will reveal that Freud collected Cézanne, Auerbach, Degas and Constable, while Degas himself chose pieces by Pissarro, Gauguin, Manet, Delacroix and Rousseau.

Matisse’s collection, starring Picasso, will feature Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Signac, while Reynolds preferred Rembrandt and Gainsborough, and Van Dyck hung works by Titian.

Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, said: “Artists by definition live with their own pictures, but what motivates them to possess works by other painters?

“Admiration and influence play their part, no doubt, but so too do personal association, social prestige and the desire to emulate another’s achievement. At times the reasons can be more complex or darker and require delving deeply into the artist’s psyche.” Picasso’s Portrait of a Woman: Dora Maar; above, Three Bathers by Cézanne, said to have been an inspiration to Matisse, who owned Degas’s La Coiffure (right)