Old greats, new light

It's probably safe to say that the National Gallery's collection of Modern Masters is the most popular display in the gallery's holdings - and judging from the plentiful crowds on the opening day of the Manet To Picasso exhibition, one can only anticipate a marked increase in that popularity.

Displayed in the Sainsbury Wing's temporary exhibition space, paintings borrowed from private collections as well as more recent acquisitions are juxtaposed with familiar favourites in order to offer fresh perspectives. So, the German artist Adolph Menzel's recently acquired 1867 painting Afternoon In The Tuileries Gardens hangs next to the painting that inspired it: Manet's celebrated Music In The Tuileries Gardens, painted five years earlier.

This is illuminating, for where Menzel offers a very conventional take on a bourgeois crowd scene, Manet's much more arresting canvas offers something compositionally bolder and looser in painterly technique. In other words, it shows just how 'modern' Manet is (though one does wonder why Menzel's minor work made it into the collection at all).

The collection itself is by no means comprehensive. Impressionism gets a fair crack but, with only one Picasso - the charming 1901 Child With A Dove - the Early Modern collection is poor, the result of earlier trustees' reluctance to purchase new French and Continental painting when it could afford to do so.

But if there is a real quibble with this display, it's that the rooms are far too cramped for the number of works - and visitors - squeezed into them.

From Manet To Picasso
The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN