The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow, 1563), didn’t make the journey from Winterthur in Switzerland. Too precious to put at risk.

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There is no requirement for a collector to accumulate thematically consistent paintings. Whim, availability, opportunism, taste, connoisseurship, pleasure, accident, catholicity all play their part. The Oskar Reinhart collection is gloriously heterogeneous, a series of bonnes bouches. What is it, if anything, that perhaps connects Goya’s ‘Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks’ (1808-12) and ‘The Adoration’? The Bruegel pushes the three kings into the margin. They are crowded out of the picture. Two of them are seen from behind, kneeling at the entrance to the stable at the extreme left of the picture. The black king, Balthazar, is at the head of a queue, waiting his turn, holding his gift. The baby Jesus has been cropped, the stable halved. The centre of attention is radically off-centre. The subject of the picture is rather teeming village life in late December. It is a great accumulation of incidentals. In the foreground, a woman climbs three brick steps from the frozen river, in her right hand a bucket which has just been filled from a hole in the ice. A child is playing on the ice in a little flat-bottomed boat, the tiny oars like drum sticks.