Impressionists on Paper review – Van Gogh sets this rambling show on fire

Royal Academy, London
Sterile sketches by Monet, Degas and Renoir make you grateful they mostly stuck to painting – but Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh’s empathy and emotion steal the show

Impressionists on Paper is a bitty ramble of a show, despite some drop dead masterpieces. Its title betrays its lack of purpose. Impressionists! On paper! For as the curators assume we all know, the French artists who shocked conservative taste in the 1870s are renowned as painter’s painters. They put their easels in the open air and caught the changing light. Yet here they draw. But that’s not a revelation at all. Renoir’s drawings of women are just as bland as his paintings.

Only one drawing in the first room grips me. A sketch by Manet of people fleeing the rain in a Paris street is full of the unexpectedness of actual life: it’s a dynamic “impression”, apparently drawn from a window, of hunched pedestrians in hats making for shelter. There is also a powerful portrait by Manet’s student Eva Gonzalès. Called The Bride, this pastel in a sharp, fast style shows a young woman sunk in despond, unhappy with her allotted role, the flowers in her hair a sad joke. But where’s the flux and flow of impressionist art in other sketches? Monet contributes two dreamlike pastels of surreally shaped seaside cliffs and rocks, but they don’t change how you see his paintings.

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