Victoria rearranges her bits

The donations from eminent Victorian collectors Constantine Ionides and John Sheepshanks form the core of the Victoria & Albert's paintings collection. Having spent most of their time scattered throughout the vast museum, they have now returned to the elegant top-lit galleries originally built for them.

The rooms have been painted in bold, period colours and many of the walls covered in a 19th-century salon-type hang. To the austerely modern gaze, it may at first appear a bit of a jumble, but it does give a context to the paintings as they might once have been seen when they were bequeathed.

Nineteenth-century English and French genre paintings, among the odd Botticelli, crowd the walls in the Ionides rooms. Among them is the first Impressionist painting to make its way into any British public collection, a dimly-lit ballet scene by Degas. But the most interesting display belongs to Constable.

Facing works by his influential predecessor, Gainsborough, two walls are devoted to the small oil sketches bequeathed by the artist's daughter. Isolated studies of scudding clouds and the sturdy trunks of elm trees, painted outdoors, hang alongside larger compositions.

A final oil study of The Hay Wain gives fresh insight into Constable's artistic processes. Here, a horse drinks lazily at the river's edge, next to his familiar canine companion. The horse doesn't make it to the final version, but the pooch - in the gentle landscape of England's collective consciousness as well as in the painting - lives on. Fisun G¸ner

Until Jan 18, Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road SW7, daily 10am to 5.45pm (Wed to 10pm), free. Tel: 020 7942 2000. Tube: South Kensington