A surprising spectacle 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, ballet shoes turned out, in an oil sketch by Degas. Her mouth drops open in exhaustion; the neck of her tutu is a frisson of rapid black lines. Pose, clothing and subject are beautifully familiar from Degas’ immense backstage repertoire. But what’s shocking is the color: the little dancer appears against a brilliant acid green.
The year is 1873 and Degas works on paper and paints his entire sheet with one of the new chemical colors. The image opposite shows the rear view of a dancer bending forward as if in a deep bow, with shapely legs, beautifully described in undulating oils, on a page of bright sugar pink. Degas is the graphic pioneer: works in charcoal on tracing paper, in watercolor enhanced with silver and gold on cardboard, in fugitive pastel on laid paper. He is the spirit, if not the hero, of this show.
Impressionists on Paper opens with an argument that is as novel as it is difficult to prove, namely that the Impressionists saw the potential of paper as no artist before them did. They could be on the promenade, by the sea or in the meadow, capturing the ever-changing effects of light on life more easily with paper, plus pencil, pen or chalk, than with bulky canvas. They began exhibiting works on paper for sale. And so, by the end of the 19th century, ‘drawing became equivalent to painting’ – both are now considered completed works.
Almost all the major impressionists can be seen in 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 loving sketches of young Parisiennes at the piano or at a picnic, completed with colored pencil. Manet’s abrupt sketch of a street scene in the rain, with carriages strolling as people lean away from the splashing water, is drawn so quickly that it seems as if the artist himself is trying to escape the shower.
There are famous works. Oil sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec Woman with a black boa, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is all fierce and feverish: the black feathers of the boa glittering on the page, the woman’s skin color an arsenal green, eyebrows like two scimitars above dark dilated pupils. Van Gogh’s somberly beautiful study of thatched roofs in a low-lying landscape, from the Tate collection, is drawn in pencil, gouache and ink on dull, copper-colored paper. The trees are in Japanese style, but all other graphic notations are unique to Van Gogh.
But most of the 77 sketches, watercolours, pastels, gouaches and temperas are almost never exhibited in public. This is partly due to their vulnerability; Museum appointments are generally required to view watercolors that deteriorate in daylight. But it is also because works on paper, at a more modest price, very often end up in private collections.
One of the most extraordinary images here, owned anonymously, is unlikely to be shown again anytime soon. Degas’s Beach at low tide shows wet golden sand, gently foaming brine and the distant horizon deepening into a single resonant horizontal above the brighter blue sky above, all amazingly rendered in pastel.
Paper offers intimacy – a woman looking straight at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses in front of the artist’s eyes
With pastel you can draw and color in one go. It “has a bloom, 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 explanation had been given through this show – about the lead point (an ancestor of the pencil) used by Manet; about the ephemerality of pastel, and the fashion for fusain (fine charcoal used to create velvety black drawings).
Seurat was such a master of these astonishingly dark scenes, in which figures move around like passing shadows, that it is disappointing to see hardly a masterpiece from him here. And it is also not clear why a tenth of the works were borrowed from the Zurich dealer David Lachenmann, although their value will undoubtedly be increased by a season on the hallowed walls of the RA.
And the show’s original premise didn’t seem particularly compelling either. Could Manet really have compared a lead point sketch to a radical oil painting? Didn’t Cézanne regard his early watercolors as private experiments? Surely Ingres’s astonishing drawings of his French subjects were prized as finished portraits long before Impressionism?
And Jacques-Émile Blanche’s high-society pastel of Madame Wallet in the opening gallery, so comically named, was in black with a wasp waist, like Sargent’s infamous Mrsmay have been widely exhibited, but it is both lightly mediocre and made on canvas, not paper.
There are weak works everywhere, that’s for sure. But they make way for all kinds of surprises. Paper offers intimacy – a woman looking straight at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses in front of the artist’s eyes; two women in close-up at the window of a hansom cabin, one of whom stares straight at the painter Giuseppe De Nittis. And the power of the working woman conveyed through the black chalk of Van Gogh’s drawing is all the more moving given the crumpled page, as if the artist had carried the image home in his pocket.
It is also true that impressionist works on paper are appreciated all over the world. The Royal Academy had a great success sixteen years ago with an exhibition of Monet’s drawings, and many museums have contributed to this exhibition. The Ashmolean in Oxford in particular has loaned out some of his smallest and largest works. The summer light of France flickers through Berthe Morisot’s sketch of a carriage fluttering under the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and through Pissarro’s watercolor of apples budding in his orchard. Most beautiful of all is his translucent winter landscape, delicately touched with pencil and watercolor on a sheet of white paper. A faint mist rises from the snow and the rainbow colors of frost and ice break through the frigid air.
• Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec is on view at the Royal Academy, London until March 10, 2024