'Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec' (Royal Academy until 10 March 2024): Not a Great Impressionism

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Woman with a Black Boa, 1892, 

Essence (diluted oil paint) on cardboard Musée d’Orsay, Paris

It must have seemed like such a good idea: those perennial crowd-pleasers, the Impressionists, but on paper. Yet the current exhibition at the RA proves that what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily work in practice. The show consists of three rooms of works which are not all on paper and not all by Impressionists. And if that sounds a mess then it's exacerbated by minimal captioning - most works are given just tombstone labels - and sweepingly generalised wall texts.

There is a bewildering lack of curation which leaves no sense of why works were hung in the order they were. Beyond the broadest chronology - the second room text discusses the 'New Directions' of Post Impressionism but starts with Monet - the main criteria seems to be to leave the biggest / most colourful till last. There is a lot of standard stuff about ‘capturing the moment’ and new portable colours (both of which apply equally to paint on canvas) and a drily precise handout which provides a glossary of terms. Anyone who knows anything about Impressionism would pick holes in the former, the general visitor may well give up with the latter. The RA, which alone among the main London museums does not give proper concession rates, boasts that the admission price includes £2.50 for the exhibition guide. I would much prefer to have been given a choice.

Of course, any Impressionist show has plenty of works which make you forget your grumbling. In the first room, Degas’ small oil and graphite Lyda, Woman with a Pair of Binoculars coolly stares you out. Later his choice of neon green paper gives startling modernity to a few rough lines. Monet’s pastels of Etretat have a smudged nightmarishness, like the evil twin of his lively, richly coloured oils. Seurat beguiles with his soft monochromes, in dialogue the workmanlike angularity of Van Gogh across the room as they both took on the legacy of mid-century realist Jean Francois Millet. There are also discoveries: Federico Zandomeneghi's soft richness lingers in the memory, and even Hippolyte Petitjean's fairly generic pointillism stands out, a burst of sunlight against the overall drabness. Too often the big names disappoint: Pissarro's Apple Picking has none of the lush late-summeriness of his oil versions of the same subject and Lautrec, despite having his name in the title, is poorly served. It is only in Woman with Black Boa that you get a true glimpse of his wit, observation and quick line.

It is never a good sign when the best works in an exhibition are already familiar, like the Degas' Woman Drying Herself, or Redon's Ophelia Among the Flowers, both of which have just taken a taxi across London from the National Gallery. In fact, Redon is a highlight overall, despite being tenuously connected with Impressionism. The eerie blackness and shimmering colour of Stained Glass Window and the glistening silence of The Golden Cell both exploit and elevate their materials far more effectively than most of the other works on show.

Odilon Redon, The Golden Cell’(Profile of a Woman’s Head), 1892,

Oil and coloured chalks with gold on paper, British Museum, London

The curators make bold claims that the Impressionists broke traditional hierarchies and reinvented paper as an exhibition-able medium, but they offer little in the way of context. The large scale and soft finish of Jacques-Emile Blanche's Portrait of Madame Henri Wallet surely needs to be referenced alongside an eighteenth-century tradition of pastel portraiture. Equally, they weaken their argument by making no distinction between works which are clearly intended as quick sketches, like Manet's The Rue Mosnier in the Rain, and 'finished' (for want of a better word) examples. Pissarro has put time, effort and a range of materials into his Market Stall and the result is considered and complex. Artists have always worked on paper, and these have always been varied in intention. Ingres' perfect pencil portraits, Constable's cloud studies, let alone the whole watercolour tradition: these surely merit acknowledgement.

Any exhibition about the Impressionists is worth seeing. There were works here that I loved and that have stayed with me, but it might have been a better show without any intervention from the curators, just pictures on walls. Why do we need to set these artists up as revolutionary, proto-Modernists? Let them create their own impression.