At museums across London, Old Masters cuddle up to the contemporary, what makes this curatorial approach so appealing?

Old Masters and contemporary art have never been closer neighbours than in London at the moment. And this is not just because of the 15-minute walk separating Frieze Masters from Frieze London. This autumn, six of the capital’s most venerable institutions are placing new works in conversation with historical ones from their collections.

Leading the field is the National Gallery’s Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation (until 7 February 2027), which pairs Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (around 1750) and Shonibare’s life-size sculptural response, Mr and Mrs Andrews without their Heads (1998), for the first time. Elsewhere, Rachel Kneebone’s Metamorphoses at the Wallace Collection (until 25 April 2027) inserts contemporary works alongside the museum’s rococo holdings, while the Courtauld Gallery presents work by Salman Toor (until 10 January 2027) and an ongoing commission by Ella Walker, both shaped by encounters with its collection.

Taken together with shows at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, these cross-period approaches may seem like the new curatorial de rigueur. Yet, at a moment of saturation, curators, artists, fair organisers and advisers argue that their appeal runs deeper than fashion. Looking back they say, has always been part of making, collecting and displaying art, driven as much by artists as by institutions.

The mixing of old and new began centuries ago. Italian Renaissance collectors, Netherlandish patrons and 18th-century French amateurs routinely displayed antiquities and works by earlier masters alongside art by their contemporaries. More recent is the deliberate curatorial framing of such encounters: placing new works beside the Old Masters that inspired them, or commissioning living artists to respond directly to historic collections.

The Wallace Collection has been testing this proposition for more than two decades, beginning with a Lucian Freud exhibition in 2004. The first living artist to exhibit there, Freud showed his recent paintings in proximity to works by Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez and Titian as a deliberate dialogue.

The institution extends that lineage this month with Kneebone’s Metamorphoses . Nine porcelain sculptures are installed throughout the galleries, including Bower and Temple , which respond directly to works by François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the collection. Kneebone describes the encounter as a “metamorphosis”, capable of “generat[ing] both connections and discords”.

For Alison Smith, the Wallace Collection’s director of collections and research, such displays can “encourage visitors to draw visual connections across time”. But she is alert to the possible pitfalls: juxtapositions can appear forced and risk misrepresenting historical works, she adds, particularly when interpreted through contemporary concerns.

Smith’s caution comes at the heel of ongoing reservations elsewhere in the field. Penelope Curtis , the former director of Tate Britain, described the vogue for contemporary art in historic settings as “ageing and … hackneyed” in a 2023 piece for Apollo magazine. Nicholas Penny , the former director of the National Gallery in London, was blunter in a 2022 London Review of Books essay, decrying “a quarter of a century of intrusive interventions by contemporary artists in major collections of Old Masters or ancient art”.

Ironically, Penny’s former institution has been among the format’s longest-standing proponents. Its Artist’s Eye programme (1975-87) invited living artists to curate pieces from the collection; Freud, Anthony Caro and Richard Hamilton were among those who showed their own work alongside their Old Master selections.

“We have been bringing Modern art into conversation with the art of the past since at least the 1850s, when Turner’s paintings were hung alongside works by the 17th-century French artist Claude Lorrain ,” says Rab MacGibbon, the associate curator of British paintings at the National Gallery. Chronology remains core to the institution’s displays, he adds, but it can also be “instructive to interrupt that from time to time”.

The Shonibare pairing, organised for the tercentenary of Gainsborough’s birth next year, makes this conversation particularly explicit. The contemporary artist’s headless figures reprise the pose of Mr and Mrs Andrews but clothe the landed gentry in African wax-print fabric, turning a canonical image of property and privilege into a commentary on wealth, empire and colonial exploitation.

MacGibbon sees the juxtaposition extending Gainsborough’s own efforts to engage with his artistic predecessors, not least Van Dyck. “Shonibare brings this long tradition of intergenerational dialogue into the present day in a way that disrupts and perhaps challenges our assumptions,” he says.

Even if the transhistorical trend is most visible in institutions, artists are often supplying the impetus across non-profit and commercial contexts alike. “Living artists are some of the most consistent visitors to Frieze Masters,” says Emanuela Tarizzo, the fair’s director. They have also participated as speakers at the fair, testing how historical art might inform present-day practice.

Elena Crippa, the Courtauld Gallery’s senior curator of contemporary art, has noticed a similar pattern. “Since joining the Courtauld and inviting artists to visit regularly, I have been struck by how many are drawn to the permanent collection,” she says.

Their engagement is visible in the Courtauld’s two contemporary presentations this autumn. Toor’s exhibition includes works inspired by Johannes Vermeer and Édouard Manet, while Walker’s commission grew out of repeated visits and close study of late medieval and early Renaissance painting, including Sandro Botticelli’s altarpiece from the collection.

Crippa sees a generational shift in the way artists approach influence. Earlier ones, she says, often felt compelled to “break barriers and consign forerunners to the past to stake a claim to the present”. Walker, by contrast, belongs to a generation that values dialogue with the past, identifying that artistic practices are “forged through conversations across time” as well as through “new and personal paths to reflect on current concerns”.

For Kneebone, such relationships are part and parcel of artistic practice. Old Masters, she says, are “a constant presence that you live and work alongside”. Her 2010 Lamentations series emerged from Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498-99) and her interest in the depiction of grief. But influence can also work retrospectively: her Raft series, begun in 2015, developed from a formal experiment in which the “simultaneous pull of opposing directions” led her to recognise an affinity with Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19).

The same impulse continues to shape the market. “Frieze Masters was built on this premise from day one… to show continuity and diversity across historical art, and to put different periods and cultures into dialogue,” Tarizzo says.

For this edition of the fair, first-time exhibitor Sascha Mehringer will present sculpture spanning the 14th to the early 20th centuries, while Kent Antiques will show Iznik ceramics from the Ottoman Empire with Mughal and Safavid miniatures and textiles. “Bringing historical art, 20th-century practice and contemporary art together also reflect how people collect and look at art today,” Tarizzo says.

Alexander Adler, the president and co-founder of the transhistorical Manhattan dealership Adler Beatty , underscores that collectors too have always behaved this way. “People who are genuinely aesthetically minded tend to respond to art across categories, whatever the period or medium or monetary value,” he says. Specialisation, in his view, often supplies useful “guardrails” rather than impenetrable silos of geography or temporality. As other ongoing examples, he points to fellow dealers such as Galerie Kugel in Paris and Blumka in New York, whose diversified displays evoke a cabinet of curiosities rather than the single-category collection.

Not every epoch-spanning juxtaposition will convince. Tarizzo acknowledges that response to cross-period curation “can be mixed” but argues that even contested pairings add value by inviting conversation and sparking reflection. “Historical art can also give us ways of understanding contemporary practice,” she says. “That movement across time is part of what makes these conversations interesting.”

For Adler, the strategy is also pragmatic. “Anything that gets more works out of storage and on view is fantastic,” he says. “Recontextualising objects and giving more people a reason to engage with them can only be a good thing.”