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.
