An astonishing sight awaits anyone who visits the Royal Academy’s latest impressionist exhibition. It can be seen even before the entrance through the double-glazed doors. In Degas’ oil sketch, a dancer stretches and stretches, revealing ballet shoes. His mouth hangs open from exhaustion; The neck of her skirt is a shiver of quick black lines. The pose, the clothes and the subject matter are beautifully familiar from Degas’s enormous backstage repertoire. But the real shocker is the color: The little dancer appears against the bright acid green.
The year is 1873, and Degas is working on paper, painting every part of his sheet with one of the new chemical colors. The image next to this, on a bright candy pink page, offers a rear view of a dancer bowing as if in a deep bow, shapely legs elegantly defined by curvy fat. Degas was a graphic pioneer: he worked with pencil on tracing paper, watercolor enhanced with silver and gold on cardboard, and fugitive pastel on paper. He is the soul, if not the hero, of this show.
Impressionists on Paper begins with a new, if difficult to prove, argument: that the Impressionists, like no other artist before them, saw the potential of paper. On the boulevard, by the sea, in the meadow, they can more easily capture the ever-changing effects of light on life with paper, pencil, pen or chalk rather than a bulky canvas. They started to offer their works on paper for sale. And by the end of the 19th century “drawing had reached the same level as painting”; both were now considered finished works.
Almost every major impressionist is exhibited at the RA. Here are Monet’s magnificent pastels showing the Normandy coast at dusk, the sea pale as milk in the dying rays of the sun; and Renoir’s loving drawings, complete with colored pencil, of young Parisians at the piano or at a picnic. Manet’s sudden sketch of a street scene in the rain, with cars speeding along as people move away from the water, is drawn so quickly it’s as if the artist himself were trying to escape the shower.
There are famous works. Oil sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec Woman with Black BoaThis image, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is wild and fiery: the boa’s black fur glistens on the page, the woman’s skin arsenic green, twin scimitar-like eyebrows above wide, dark pupils. Van Gogh’s beautifully sombre work from the Tate collection, showing thatched roofs in a low-lying landscape, is drawn in pencil, gouache and ink on matte, copper-coloured paper. The style of the trees is Japanese, but all other graphic notations are solely by Van Gogh.
But most of his 77 sketches, watercolours, pastels, gouache and tempera paintings are rarely exhibited publicly. This is partly due to their fragility; A museum appointment is usually required to see watercolors that deteriorate in daylight. But this is also because works on paper are more modestly priced and often end up in private collections.
One of the most unusual images here, owned anonymously, is unlikely to be shown again anytime soon. Degas’ Low Tide Beach It shows wet golden sand, gently bubbling salt water, and the distant horizon deepening into a single resonant horizontal against the brighter blue sky above; all achieved in a surprisingly pastel color.
Paper offers intimacy; A woman looking directly at Degas through binoculars, lenses rivaling the artist’s eyes
Pastel allows drawing and coloring at the same time. In the words of late 19th-century critic and novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, “it has a floral, velvety smoothness that neither watercolor nor oil can touch”. I wish more explanation had been offered through this show – about the leading edge (the ancestor of the pencil) that Manet used; about the volatility of pastel and the fashion of fusai (fine charcoal used to create velvety black drawings).
Seurat was such a master at these surprisingly dark scenes where figures move like shadows that it is disappointing not to see a single masterpiece by him here. It is also unclear why one in 10 of the works were borrowed from Zurich dealer David Lachenmann; However, there is no doubt that their value will increase even more with a season spent within the sacred walls of RA.
And the show’s initial premise didn’t seem particularly convincing either. Could Manet really equate a pencil sketch with a radical oil painting? Didn’t Cézanne regard his first watercolors as private experiments? Were Ingres’s magnificent drawings of French models considered finished portraits long before Impressionism?
And Jacques-Émile Blanche’s high-society pastel Madame Purse in the opening gallery, hilariously named, stood out in pin-waist black like Sargent’s infamous dress. Ms.It may have been widely exhibited, but it is both mediocre in its flow and done on canvas rather than paper.
Of course, there are weak works throughout. But they lead to all kinds of surprises. Paper offers intimacy; a woman looking directly at Degas through binoculars, lenses that rival the artist’s eyes; two women taken close-up at the window of a carriage; one looks directly at painter Giuseppe De Nittis. And the strength of the working woman, conveyed by the black chalk in Van Gogh’s drawing, is even more impressive considering the crumpled page, as if the artist had carried the picture home in his pocket.
It is also true that impressionist works on paper are valued worldwide. The Royal Academy had great success with an exhibition of Monet’s drawings 16 years ago, and many museums also contributed to this show. The Ashmolean at Oxford in particular lent some of his smallest and largest works. The summer light of France flickers in Berthe Morisot’s sketch of a carriage flying under trees in the Bois de Boulogne and in Pissarro’s watercolor of apples sprouting in an orchard. Best of all is the transparent winter landscape, delicately woven in pencil and watercolor on a sheet of white paper. A light mist spreads from the snow, and the rainbow colors of frost and ice refract in the freezing air.
• Impressionists on Paper: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec is at the Royal Academy London until 10 March 2024