The French have it

In the first room of the Royal Academy’s Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting — a strangely mixed and muted Impressionist exhibition — a Monet ‘Haystacks’ is flanked by two lively open-air scenes by Sargent, one of them depicting Monet himself at work. This group is obviously intended to set the tone and pace of the display, but it raises false hopes. Nearby, the pedestrian nature of William Morris Hunt’s gloomy copy of Millet’s ‘Three Men Shearing Sheep in a Barn’ sounds a knell of warning. Paintings by Boudin and Diaz help to rekindle the viewer’s optimism, but the show’s fundamental flaw is soon revealed. The problem with hanging French Masters with American pupils is that the eye tends to skate over the lesser works to enjoy the greater. So a perfectly reasonable (but not very interesting) river landscape by Joseph Foxcroft Cole is ignored in favour of the lovely Daubigny next to it.