by Anyone visiting the Royal Academy’s latest impressionist exhibition is in for a spectacular sight. It is visible even before entering, through the double glass doors. A dancer is swaying and stretching, ballet shoes turned out, in an oil sketch by Degas. Her mouth is falling open with exhaustion; the neck of her tutu has sharp black lines. There is a beautiful familiarity with pose, costume and subject matter from Degas’ vast backstage repertoire. But what a riot of color: the little dancer appears against a brilliant acid green.
It is 1873 and Degas is working on paper, painting his entire sheet with one of the new chemical colours. This image juxtaposes the back view of a dancer bending over as if in a deep arc, his shapely legs exquisitely outlined in sinuous oils, on a page with bright sugar pink. Degas is the graphic pioneer: working with charcoal on tracing paper, in watercolor raised with silver and gold on cardboard, in fugitive crystal on laid paper. He is the spirit of this show, if not the hero.
Impressionists on Paper open with an argument, as novel as it may be difficult to prove – namely, that the impressionists saw the potential of paper as no artists before them. They could be on the boulevard, by the sea, on the meadow, capturing the ever-changing effects of light on life more easily with paper, plus pencil, pen or chalk, than the cumbersome canvas. They started displaying works on paper for sale. And this is how, by the end of the 19th century, “drawing had reached the same level as painting” – both now admired as finished works.
Almost every major impressionist has exhibited at the UK. Here are Monet’s glorious pastels of the coast of Normandy at dawn, the sea white as milk in the dying rays of the sun; and Renoir’s affectionate sketches of young Parisiennes at the piano, or on a picnic, finished in colored pencil. Manet’s sudden sketch of a street scene in the rain, carriages shadowing and people bending away from the spray, is so fleeting, it is as if the artist himself is trying to escape the shower.
There are famous works. Toulouse-Lautrec oil sketch Woman With Black Boa, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, everything is fierce and febrile: the black feathers of the boa scintillating on the page, the complex of the women arsenic green, eyebrows like a couple of scimitars above dark dilated pupils. Van Gogh’s beautifully bleak study of thatched roofs in a low landscape, from the Tate collection, is drawn in pencil, gouache and ink on copper colored paper. The trees are Japanese in style, but all other graphic notations are Van Gogh’s own signatures.
But most of the 77 sketches, watercolours, pastels, gouaches and temperas are rarely exhibited in public. This is partly due to their vulnerability; Museum appointments are usually required to view watercolors that deteriorate in daylight. But it is also because works on paper, at a lower price, often end up in private collections.
One of the most unusual images here, owned anonymously, is unlikely to appear again anytime soon. Degas on Beach at Low Tide golden wet sand, soft foaming sea salt and the far horizon showing only one resonant horizon above the brighter blue sky above, all achieved, magnificently, in pastels.
Intimacy paper – a woman looking directly back at Degas through binoculars, rival lenses to the artist’s eyes
Pastel allows drawing and coloring all at the same time. In the words of the late 19th-century critic and novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, it has a “floral, velvety smoothness… that cannot be touched by watercolors or oils”. If only more had been offered as an explanation in this show – about the lead point (ancestor of the pencil) that Manet used; about the volatility of pastels, and the vogue for fusin (fine charcoal used to make velvety black drawings).
Seurat was such a master of these wonderful dark scenes, where figures move about like shadows that have passed, that it is disappointing to see one of his masterpieces here. And it is also not clear why a tenth of the works were loaned from the Zurich dealer David Lachenmann, although there is no doubt that their value will improve after a season on the walls of the Authority.
And the premise of the show didn’t look very convincing either. Could Manet really balance a pencil point sketch with a radical painting in oils? Didn’t Cézanne consider his early watercolors private experiments? Surely Ingres’ magnificent drawings of his French settings were highly regarded as finished portraits long before impressionism?
And Jacques-Émile’s high-society pastel Blanche de Madame Wallet in the open gallery, so wittily named, rose up in wasp-waisted black like Sargent’s comment. Madame Xit may have been widely exhibited, but both mediums are visible and done on canvas, not paper.
There is weak labor throughout, to be sure. But they give way to all kinds of surprises. Paper offers an intimate relationship – a woman looking directly back at Degas through binoculars, combat lenses on the artist’s eyes; two women nearby at the window of a hansom cab, one staring directly at the painter Giuseppe De Nittis. And the force of the working woman transmitted through the black chalk of Van Gogh’s drawing is even sharper in the light of the distressed page, as if the artist carried the image home in his pocket.
It is also true that impressionist works on paper are admired worldwide. The Royal Academy had a great success with a show of Monet’s drawings 16 years ago, and many museums contributed to this show. The Ashmolean in Oxford, in particular, lent some of his smaller and larger works. French summer light flickers through Berthe Morisot’s sketch of a carriage floating beneath the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and in Pissarro’s watercolor an apple growing in his orchard. Best of all is his diaphanous winter landscape, done in pencil and watercolor on a sheet of white paper. A faint haze emits from the snow, and the rainbow colors of frost and ice shift through the frozen air.
• Impressions on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec is at the Royal Academy, London, until 10 March 2024
