The Magic of Gallery Time at Art History Link-Up at the Courtauld, Somerset House and Online

What is the best thing about Art History Link-Up? It could be the incredibly passionate teaching team, or the way the programme opens doors to new perspectives, ideas, and opportunities. Students might say it’s the delicious array of biscuits available during snack break.    

For me, however, the magic of AHLU happens during the ‘Gallery Time’- a dedicated 30 minutes at the end of each AH4E class (or after snack time for the HPQ students), which provides the opportunity to study masterpieces from the Courtauld collection in situ.

Here are three reasons why:

The power of simply looking

Gallery Time provides an exciting opportunity for unmediated encounters with artworks, placing granular visual analysis and creative interpretation at the centre. Guided by a dedicated team of teaching assistants, students are encouraged to simply look, notice, observe and interpret, sometimes without any prior contextualisation.

Conversations frequently open with a simple ‘What can you see?’ or ‘What do you notice?’, and are followed by a period of sustained looking, allowing students the time and space to develop their own responses. This moment of uncertainty and curiosity is often where some of the most exciting and original ideas in Art History emerge, and helps students to recognise the value of their initial interpretations.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has reported that the average visitor spends just 27 seconds looking at an artwork in a gallery. However, during AHLU’s Gallery Time, however, students can spend almost 30 minutes with a single work, and still feel they have only scratched the surface.

Unexpected surprises in situ

Through Gallery Time, students also learn the importance of experiencing artworks in person.

I always enjoy the moment when students discover that a work looks strikingly different in the flesh. Rubens’s The Family of Jan Brueghel the Elder, for instance, is often much larger than expected, while Monet’s Autumn Effect at Argenteuilreveals a striking impasto when viewed up close.

These revelations often prompt entirely new interpretations of artworks. As the late David Hockney reminds us: “Put your phone down. Look with both eyes.” Yet even our online students, who join our hybrid classes virtually, benefit from this approach. During their Gallery Time, they explore works through the Courtauld’s virtual tour, using high-definition zoom functions to conduct close and sustained studies within the context of the gallery.

The gallery as classroom and playground

Perhaps most importantly, Gallery Time means that, for AHLU students, the Courtauld becomes their gallery.

Through regular weekly visits, students come to know its spaces almost instinctively, navigating the galleries with confidence and familiarity.  The gallery becomes a classroom: a place to challenge, critique, question, laugh, debate, and reflect. Works may sometimes undergo detailed technical scrutiny; at other times, they enter into conversation with artworks from entirely different cultures and historical periods. A Van Gogh painting might, one week, prompt a meticulous examination of Chevreul’s colour theories, and the next be considered alongside Gentileschi’s allegorical portraits. Thanks to AHLU students, these objects are continually revisited, reassessed, and reframed in thoughtful, imaginative, and often surprising ways.

That, for me, is the magic of Gallery Time.

Ailsa McTernan, AHLU Teaching Team

Applications are now open for the tenth year of our ‘Art History for Everyone’ programme, a free Art History A Level and EPQ courses for state students taught online and at the Courtauld on term-time Saturdays. Find out more and apply online - it takes five minutes - here: https://www.arthistorylinkup.org/programmes/art-history-epq

Ailsa McTernan has worked for AHLU since 2025. She studied for both a BA (Hons) and an MPhil in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, specialising in the intersections between music and art in Modernist Germany. She now works as a part-time History of Art teacher at St Paul’s Girls’ School and as a lecturer for Art Historical London.