Impressionists by the Sea, Royal Academy

The Royal Academy’s show of Impressionism is a lot more predictable than the weather on the beaches that the exhibition depicts. For financial directors, the light-dappled surfaces of these French masters may be a safety net. But for the art lover already wearied by the déjà vu of the Academy’s Summer Exhibition, Impressionists by the Sea feels like a piece of uninspired programming – not least when almost a third of the images are by Monet. The Academy staged another Monet show only a few months ago.

Monet is eminently marketable. The sale of his Waterloo Bridge a couple of weeks ago for almost £18 million only proved that. Monet was a prolific master. And overfamiliarity has bred a now almost fashionable contempt. The apogee of a once radical artistic movement is too easily consigned to the lands of decorative cliché (it’s not surprising that this show is sponsored by Farrow & Ball, the paint manufacturer). So what can Impressionists by the Sea add? Is it just a precursor to Monet and the Mousemat on show in the Academy shop?

Impressionists by the Sea has a narrow focus. It presents images of the coastline of northern France. We look at cloudy skies and long beaches and wave-splashed cliffs, at fisherfolk and sailing boats and, of course, the crumbling rock arch at Etretat, which is probably the most painted geological feature (here we see it in the work of Boudin, Jong-kind, Courbet, and of course Monet).

The visitor must depend on the wall texts to draw this show together thematically. They set these landscapes in the wider context of the development of tourism. This piece of coastline underwent a rapid transformation in the second half of the 19th century. With the rise of the railway and the expansion of an urban leisured class, the world of weather-battered fisherfolk became the playground of the holidaying bourgeoisie.

The beaches of Trouville and Deauville and Sainte-Adresse became known as “the summer boulevard of Paris”. Hotels opened, villas were built, and the sands and seas where fishermen once eked out a living became a place of sailing regattas and bathing huts, of blustering crinolines and frolicking lap dogs.

What the pictures show is how a modern art movement responded to this new modern world. And to present this idea clearly requires more than a straightforward Impressionist show. It must take this seaside story back to its beginnings.

This should mean going right back as far as Old Testament symbolism in the catalogue essays that adorn the walls of the show. However, for the more realistic purposes of curatorship, it means picking up the narrative in the late 1850s.

Marine painting was out of fashion, but late Romantics such as Eugène Isabey still brooded on the subject of the watery perils. His 1861 Low Tide dramatises a tough human struggle against elemental dangers, while Jules Breton poses statuesque locals like classical gods.

But by this time less extravagant canvases of the coast were starting to find a market among an urban population that had spent happy holidays down on the beach. The coastlines of Normandy became an increasingly popular place for the plein air artist to set up his easel. Melodrama was banished as the local boy Boudin arrived to show fashionable society perched like sandpipers along the sea shore. Courbet, Corot, Whistler, Millet and Manet were there too. They came to see what the tourist loves – the play of light across fresh breezy views.

As visitors stand in a room full of images by Impressionist precursors, they can watch the clouds billowing across blustery skies, and see a storm sea rise, break in dark sheets of rain, and send waves crashing shorewards before passing away over some distant point, leaving luminous sunshine and eventually a pellucid calm.

These are the sort of images (and there are some beautiful pictures, among them the vaporous mists of Whistler’s Sea and Rain and the lowering drama of Courbet’s Waterspout) against which Monet pitted his talents. We see him first in the early 1860s, under the influence of Boudin, seizing the scene before him in rapid “impressionistic” style. The sparkle of light on water is just beginning to break his picture plane into dabs of pure colour.

It returns to the story at the start of the 1880s. Monet has broken entirely with convention. He captures the landscape in an iridescent display of flashes and splotches. He is asking the spectator to see in an entirely new way, to adopt a unique viewpoint. And, as if to symbolise this, he turns his back on the suburbanising sprawl of fashion. Literally, and artistically, he adopts the view of the solitary explorer.

Monet asks us to look at the world anew. And this show asks us to remember how radical this must have seemed by comparing his pictures with those of prevailing contemporary taste. It presents a selection of beach scenes from the Paris Salon of the period. All the artists are aware that the landscape is being eroded by tourism. Most take what seems to be a well-trodden path to some alternative viewpoint.

But Monet doesn’t go anywhere. Like a true visionary, he just looks at the ordinary but in an entirely new light. As with a mounted gem, it is the setting as much as the precious centrepiece paintings that matter to this show. The context can turn a group of prettily attractive paintings into something more precious. A flash of this freshness makes an otherwise modest show of Monet paintings worth a visit.

Impressionists by the Sea is at the Royal Academy (0870 8488484) from Sat to Sept 30

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