A startling sight awaits anyone visiting the Royal Academy’s latest impressionist exhibition. It is visible even before entry, through the double glass doors. A dancer is yawning and stretching, ballet shoes turned out, in an oil sketch by Degas. Her mouth is falling open with exhaustion; the neck of her tutu is a shiver of rapid black lines. Pose, clothes and subject are beautifully familiar from Degas’s immense backstage repertoire. But what shocks is the colour: the little dancer appears against a brilliant acid green.
It is 1873 and Degas is working on paper, painting his sheet all over with one of the new chemical colours. The image next to this presents the rear view of a dancer bending over as if in deep curtsey, shapely legs exquisitely described in sinuous oils, on a page of bright sugar pink. Degas is the graphic pioneer: working in charcoal on tracing paper, in watercolour heightened 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, as novel as it may be hard to prove – namely, that the impressionists saw the potential for paper as no artists before them. They could be on the boulevard, by the sea, in the meadow, capturing the ever-changing effects of light on life more readily with paper, plus pencil, pen or chalk, than cumbersome canvas. They began to exhibit works on paper for sale. And this was how, by the end of the 19th century, “drawing achieved parity with painting” – both now to be considered finished works.
Just about every great impressionist is on display at the RA. Here are Monet’s glorious pastels of the Normandy coast at dusk, the sea pale as milk in the sun’s dying rays; and Renoir’s affectionate sketches of young Parisiennes at the piano, or on a picnic, rounded out in coloured pencil. Manet’s abrupt sketch of a street scene in the rain, carriages skeltering along as people lean away from the spray, is so swiftly drawn, it’s as if the artist himself is trying to escape the shower.
There are famous works. Toulouse-Lautrec’s oil sketch Woman With a Black Boa, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is all fierce and febrile: the black feathers of the boa scintillating on the page, the woman’s complexion arsenical green, eyebrows like twin scimitars above dark dilated pupils. Van Gogh’s bleakly beautiful study of thatched roofs in a low-lying landscape, from the Tate collection, is drawn in pencil, gouache and ink on dull, copper-coloured paper. The trees are Japanese in style, but all the other graphic notations are uniquely Van Gogh’s own.
But most of the 77 sketches, watercolours, pastels, gouaches and temperas are scarcely ever exhibited in public. This is partly because of their fragility; museum appointments are generally required to see watercolours that deteriorate in daylight. But it is also because works on paper, more modestly priced, very often end up in private collections.
One of the most extraordinary images here, anonymously owned, isn’t likely to be shown again any time soon. Degas’s Beach at Low Tide shows wet golden sand, softly foaming brine and the far horizon deepening to a single resonant horizontal above the brighter blue sky above, all achieved, amazingly, in pastel.
Pastel allows for drawing and colouring all at once. It “has a bloom, a velvet smoothness… that neither watercolour 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 show – about the leadpoint (an ancestor of pencil) used by Manet; about the volatility of pastel, and the vogue for fusain (fine charcoal used to make velvety black drawings).
Seurat was such a master of these amazingly dark scenes, where figures move about like passing shadows, that it is disappointing to see scarcely a single masterpiece by him here. And nor is it obvious why a 10th of the works have been borrowed from the Zurich dealer David Lachenmann, though no doubt their value will be enhanced by a season on the RA’s hallowed walls.
And nor did the show’s initial premise seem especially persuasive. Could Manet really have equated a leadpoint sketch with a radical painting in oils? Didn’t Cézanne regard his early watercolours as private experiments? Surely Ingres’s stupendous drawings of his French sitters 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, got up in wasp-waisted black like Sargent’s notorious Madame X, might have been widely exhibited but it is both glibly mediocre and made on canvas, not paper.
There are weak works throughout, to be sure. But they give way to all kinds of surprises. Paper offers intimacy – a woman looking straight back at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses to the artist’s eyes; two women in closeup at a hansom cab window, one staring straight at the painter Giuseppe De Nittis. And the force of the working woman transmitted 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 true, too, that impressionist works on paper are prized the world over. The Royal Academy had a huge success with a show of Monet’s drawings 16 years ago, and many museums have contributed to this show. The Ashmolean in Oxford, in particular, has lent some of its smallest and greatest works. The summer light of France flickers through Berthe Morisot’s sketch of a carriage flittering beneath the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and in Pissarro’s watercolour of apples burgeoning in his orchard. Best of all is his diaphanous winter landscape, delicately touched in with pencil and watercolour on a sheet of white paper. A faint haze emits from the snow, and the rainbow colours of frost and ice refract through the freezing air.
• Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec is at the Royal Academy, London, until 10 March 2024
