The Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery occupies the North Wing of Somerset House, the rooms Sir William Chambers built in the 1780s for the Royal Academy, the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. The Institute has held the building since 1989, and reopened its galleries in November 2021 after a three-year, ground-up rebuild that restored the top-floor exhibition hall to its original proportions and reordered the visitor route around the collection: Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and the UK's most significant holding of Cezanne. Hire here runs through the Gallery's own events team, separate from the Somerset House Trust's courtyard and New Wing spaces next door.

The LVMH Great Room, on the third floor, is London's oldest purpose-built exhibition space and the venue's marquee room: a barrel-vaulted hall hung with the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection, opening onto the smaller Weston Gallery. One floor down, the Blavatnik Fine Rooms are a run of six interconnected galleries under Chambers' original ceilings, built for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition and now showing Renaissance and Baroque works by Botticelli and Rubens; either floor can be hired alone, or dually for a reception that moves through both. The Courtauld Terrace, a sunken outdoor space off the Institute's own vaults, and the ground-floor Courtauld Cafe round out the smaller-scale options.

Private views can be built into any hire, with a Gallery guide on hand to walk guests through the collection before or after dinner. Hire is dry, from an approved supplier list.