The Unknown Monet
Royal Academy, W1

Close your eyes and say Monet. Does your imagination swim in a haze of watery light: in a world of shimmering lily ponds and opalescent landscapes? If so, then blink — clear your head of the clichés before booking your ticket to the Royal Academy’s latest show. The Unknown Monet presents an alternative vision of this most famous of Impressionist masters. It will definitely not match up to populist expectations. And nor is it one of which the artist himself would have approved.

Monet was not just a master of painting. He was a master at self-promotion. He constructed his image as carefully as he composed his colour symphonies. As he grew increasingly successful the image that he set out to promote was that of the ultimate modern artist. He wanted to impress upon the public an idea of himself as the supreme Impressionist stepping out into the landscape with palette and pigments to capture what he saw in all its sunlit freshness.

Even the untutored, he suggested, could relate to such spontaneity. “People discuss my art and pretend to understand it as if it were necessary to understand,” he famously said, “but it is simply necessary to love.” Monet wanted to distance himself from all the traditions and academic conventions that drawing implied.

Yet now the Royal Academy is putting on an exhibition of Monet’s graphic works. It invites us to “understand” a new aspect of one of our best-loved masters. The rebel who refused to go into the life room as an art student, it turns out, was a practised caricaturist. The resolute landscapist could draw figures beautifully. The artist who prized spontaneity would make careful preparatory studies. The painter who would be photographed with a cigarette rather than a pencil between his fingers kept a sketchbook into old age.

For the past five years Dr Jim Ganz and Richard Kendall, colleagues at the Clark Institute in Massachusetts have been poring over Monet’s hefty five-volume catalogue raisonné , scouting out little-known and often never before publicly shown works on paper from museums and private collections the world over, to present an alternative portrait. It was only in the past year or so that they came across an unpublished document that ratified their theories.

They unexpectedly came across the memoirs of a family friend of the Monets, Théophile Beguin Billecocq. And the impression that these gave of the young Claude are markedly different from the reminiscences that Monet himself later propagated. The young Monet was known as Oscar — one of the fascinating new items of minutiae to emerge from this memoir is that he changed his name to Claude while he was a military conscript because he was so mocked for his “ridiculous Christian name”. The memoir suggests that his family appear not to have been the philistines that Monet suggested but cultured enthusiasts who fostered his artistic talents.

“Every scrap of paper,” Billecocq writes, “no matter how small” was drawn upon by Monet, “with country scenes, tiny seascapes and fishermen”. These are the sort of scraps that this show now assembles. It is not a hazy stroll through Giverny: it’s a focused scholarly journey.

We see the young Monet making meticulous little studies around Normandy, honing his caricaturist’s eye on the local population of Le Havre, carefully compiling preparatory sketches (we first meet his future wife, Camille, as a pencilled figure posing for her part in the hugely ambitious and never completed Luncheon on the Grass, which he planned to submit to the Salon as a challenge to Manet’s notorious 1863 masterpiece) and later, when he was famous, making use of his skills as a draughtsman to promote his work through the mass media. He translated his paintings into graphic works for publication. “You have sent some drawings of great beauty . . .” the writer Octave Mirbeau, with whom Monet collaborated, observed in a letter. “For a man who doesn’t know how to draw, that must have surprised you,” he teased.

Monet, as Mirbeau well knew, was an accomplished draughtsman. By his mid twenties he had mastered charcoals, pencils and chalks; learnt to capture likenesses and personalities, to compose complex landscapes and people them with figures. And further to this, a few early drawings — notably a series of boldly confident but until now largely unstudied black chalk sketches — appear to have been intended as art works in their own right. Most of them are signed, though what Monet intended to do with them remains open to speculation.

But for the most part the drawings on display at the RA are things that Monet at best considered marginal, at worst pretended did not exist. He certainly did not consider them to have aesthetic appeal. And so what is there for the visitor for whom a staccato little seascape, albeit the only known pen-and-ink drawing that Monet did, still looks like little more than a scratchy little scribble?

The pastels rescue the spectator — and this show. Here, for instance, is an enchanting series of early pastel landscapes. Monet is only about 25, but already he is fascinated by light. It lies in pools amid the patterns of fields, scuds through the cloudy skies with a storm, dissolves into the pearly haze of a far-off horizon or lays itself down in burning streaks across the dawn.

Or here are his pastel drawings of the cliffs at Etretat that were to become the subject of so many of his canvases.

One of them is now put on display for comparison. But its weather-sculpted forms, captured in the bright, sunlit hues of gleaming oils, looks almost garish beside the sombre, almost elegiac little pastels of the same subject. They capture a dark drama that feels intimate and intense. And here are Monet’s drawings of London: of the Thames with its bridges and barges progressively swallowed by a luminous smog.

For Monet, pastel was liberating. Before he mastered the rapid brush-strokes of his later oil technique it offered him through both line and colour a way of working rapidly for the effects he was after.

Seeing this show, one can’t help but wish that Monet had worked in this medium more often. He turned to it only sporadically and, in the case of his London drawings, only because his other materials had not yet arrived.

But as the exhibition ends with two big lily paintings — ostensibly there to demonstrate underlying draughtsmanship but presumably included also as a sop to the disappointed Monet lover — one wonders what an image such as this might have looked like in pastel. In the end, how much does it matter that Monet should have concealed his skills as a draughtsman? For those for whom the artist’s personal mythology is a part of the creative process, the exposure will add nothing to an appreciation of the paintings.

This exhibition presents an undeniably impressive piece of scholarship. But following it feels a bit like analysing a dream. For all the hidden complexities that are untangled, some mysterious essence seems to be lost.

The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings, sponsored by Bank of America, is at the Royal Academy, W1 (0870 8488484; www. royalacademy.org.uk), from Sat.

Hear Rachel Campbell-Johnston talk about the show, together with Clark curator Dr Jim Ganz, at www.timesonline.co.uk/visualarts

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