by A striking sight awaits anyone who visits the Royal Academy’s latest Impressionist exhibition. It is visible even before entering, through the double glass doors. A dancer yawns and stretches, wearing ballet slippers, in an oil sketch by Degas. Her mouth opens in exhaustion; the neck of her tutu is a tremor of quick black lines. The pose, clothing and subject matter are wonderfully familiar from Degas’s immense backstage repertoire. But what is surprising is the color: the little dancer appears on a bright acid green.
It’s 1873 and Degas is working on paper, painting his entire sheet with one of the new chemical colors. The image next to it features the rear view of a dancer bent over as if in a deep bow, her shapely legs exquisitely depicted in sinuous oil paints, on a bright sugary pink page. Degas is the graphic pioneer: he works with charcoal on tracing paper, with watercolor enhanced with silver and gold on cardboard, with fugitive pastel on laid paper. He is the spirit, if not the hero, of this show.
Impressionists on Paper begins with an argument, as novel as it may be difficult to prove: namely, that the Impressionists saw the potential of paper like no other artist before them. They could be on the boulevard, by the sea, on the prairie, capturing the ever-changing effects of light on life more easily with paper, pencil, pen or chalk, than with a cumbersome canvas. They began to exhibit works on paper for sale. And that is how, at the end of the 19th century, “drawing achieved parity with painting,” both now considered finished works.
Almost all the great impressionists are exhibited at the RA. Here are Monet’s glorious pastels of the Normandy coast at dusk, the sea pale as milk in the dying rays of the sun; and Renoir’s affectionate sketches of young Parisian women playing the piano or at a picnic, rounded off with colored pencils. Manet’s abrupt sketch of a street scene in the rain, with carriages gliding as people move away from the spray, is drawn so quickly that it is as if the artist himself were trying to escape the shower.
There are famous works. Oil sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec Woman with a black boa, on loan from the Orsay Museum in Paris, is all fierce and feverish: the black feathers of the boa sparkling on the page, the woman’s complexion an arsenic green, eyebrows like twin scimitars over dark, dilated pupils. Van Gogh’s Sombre and Beautiful Study of Thatched Roofs in a Low Landscape, from the Tate Collection, is drawn in pencil, gouache and ink on opaque copper-colored paper. The trees are in the Japanese style, but all other graphic notations are exclusively Van Gogh’s.
But most of the 77 sketches, watercolors, pastels, gouaches and temperas are rarely exhibited in public. This is partly due to its fragility; Museum appointments are usually required to view watercolors that deteriorate in daylight. But it is also because works on paper, of more modest price, usually end up in private collections.
One of the most extraordinary images here, owned anonymously, is not likely to be shown again any time soon. Of gas Beach at low tide shows wet golden sand, gently foaming brine, and the distant horizon deepening into a single echoing horizontal against the brightest blue sky, all achieved, surprisingly, in pastel colors.
The role offers intimacy: a woman looking directly at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses to the artist’s eyes.
Pastel allows you to draw and color at the same time. It has “a flower, a velvety softness… that neither watercolor nor oil can touch,” in the words of the late 19th-century critic and novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. If only more had been offered by way of explanation through this program: about the nib (an ancestor of the pencil) used by Manet; about the volatility of pastel and the fashion for fusain (fine charcoal used to make velvety black drawings).
Seurat was such a master of these astonishingly dark scenes, where figures move like passing shadows, that it is disappointing to see hardly a single masterpiece of his here. And it is also not obvious why a tenth of the works have been borrowed from Zurich dealer David Lachenmann, although their value will no doubt increase with a season in the hallowed walls of the RA.
And the show’s initial premise didn’t seem particularly persuasive either. Could Manet really have equated a spot sketch with a radical oil painting? Didn’t Cézanne consider his first watercolors to be private experiments? Surely Ingres’s stupendous drawings of his French models were appreciated as finished portraits long before Impressionism?
And Madame Wallet’s Jacques-Émile Blanche high-society cake in the opening gallery, so comically named, rose in wasp-waisted black like Sargent’s famous one. Mrs.It could have been widely exhibited, but it is both brilliantly mediocre and done on canvas, not paper.
There are weak works everywhere, no doubt. But they give way to all kinds of surprises. The role offers intimacy: a woman looking directly at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses to the artist’s eyes; Two women in the foreground in front of the window of a cab, one of them staring at the painter Giuseppe De Nittis. And the strength of the working woman conveyed through the black chalk of Van Gogh’s drawing is all the more poignant given the crumpled page, as if the artist had taken the image home in his pocket.
It is also true that impressionist works on paper are appreciated throughout the world. The Royal Academy had great success with an exhibition of Monet’s drawings 16 years ago, and many museums have contributed to this exhibition. Oxford’s Ashmolean, in particular, has lent some of his smallest and largest works. The light of French summer flickers across Berthe Morisot’s sketch of a carriage fluttering beneath the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and on Pissarro’s watercolor of apples blooming in his orchard. Best of all is its clear winter landscape, delicately retouched with pencil and watercolor on a sheet of white paper. The snow gives off a light mist and the rainbow colors of frost and ice refract through the frozen air.
• Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec will be at the Royal Academy, London until March 10, 2024.
