Impressionists on Paper review, Royal Academy, London

'After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself' by Edgar Degas (1890-1895, detail)

(Image credit: IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo)

published 5 January 2024

"Impressionism – at the Royal Academy? Again?" That was my first thought on hearing about this latest show, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph: I feared that its "overfamiliarity" would risk inducing "narcolepsy". But I was wrong. "Impressionists on Paper" puts forward a "neat, clear argument": that in the late 19th century, technical advances allowed good quality paper and paints to be manufactured in quantity. This considerably improved the status of works on paper, hitherto rarely appreciated as anything other than "preparatory" drawings. From here on in, "they came to be viewed on a par, almost, with paintings" – and Paris's artists exploited this to the full. Bringing together pictures by all of the movement's most famous names – the show is subtitled "Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec" – as well as works from lesser-known talents, it shows how the impressionists and those who came in their wake took drawing in new directions, transforming the medium. Containing wonders aplenty, from Manet's "rain-slickened" view of a Parisian street to Odilon Redon's view of "human-headed flowers sprouting surreally from a vase", it adds up to an impressive exhibition "filled with delicious little surprises".

There are a couple of "masterpieces" here, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Van Gogh provides several, including a landscape of Paris's peripheral fortifications, in which he deploys watercolours to turn the sky "a heartbreaking blue"; and an early depiction of a "peasant women with a face like a bereft elf". Just as impressive is Toulouse-Lautrec's "explicit" sketch of a lesbian couple working in a Paris brothel – a "raw yet sensitive" picture that brims with empathy for his subjects. Such highlights aside, the show is short on revelations: Renoir's drawings of women, it turns out, "are just as bland as his paintings"; and even a pair of "dreamlike" Monet views of "surreally shaped seaside cliffs" tell us nothing new about his art. The impressionists "did comparatively little important work on paper. They really were painters or nothing." And this is largely a rather "damp" show.

True, the quality is "mixed", said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Yet the best of the works here, by Degas and Cézanne – the period's "supreme innovators" – are real "pearls". The former, represented by 15 drawings, "stuns and dominates": in his "stark" 1869 pastel "Beach at Low Tide", "you can almost feel the damp sand"; the later "After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself" is "a tumble of red hair", "creamy pink towel", and "brilliant yellow chair". Cézanne, meanwhile, creates watercolours that abbreviate and reduce their subject to "translucent washes, white paper left blank as part of the composition". Overall, this is an "enjoyable" exhibition, in which 19th century Paris "comes to us multi-faceted, direct and intimate".