Royal Academy, London
Once upon a time in America, the art collector was regarded as a paragon whose virtue increased with every purchase. The ownership of art implied taste, which implied humanity in turn. It hardly mattered that the railroad magnate had invested on the instructions of some dealer like Duveen or that he might be a ruthless industrialist such as Henry Frick, once known as the most hated man in America. The collector's judgment and integrity, apparent when he bought a Rembrandt for his Upper East Side mansion, were confirmed when he left both to the nation.
It sounds like pure hokum until one considers the case of Sterling Clark, whose rich collection of French art is currently on show at the Royal Academy. Clark (1877-1956) was heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. He inherited an entire block of Manhattan before he was out of his teens. But where his peers returned after Yale to tend the family fortunes, Clark signed up for the army, won a Silver Star during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and led an expedition to map the mountains of northern China. He is more TE Lawrence than Henry James.
And in an age when most Americans in Paris were behaving like tourists out of Edith Wharton, Clark lived in the city discreetly for decades, only returning to America in the 50s to open the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in rural Massachusetts. That great collection, in picture-postcard Williamstown, includes Goyas, Rembrandts and the rarest Piero in America, all bought without the advice of dealers as Clark had a well-founded mistrust of middlemen. He's that rare American collector: independent, retiring, unaffectedly philanthropic, the kind who gives taste a good name.
While the institute is being enlarged (Clark left a vast bequest for further acquisitions), the French works are out earning their keep. Clark loved impressionism, and the Royal Academy is full of dazzling heat – June in Giverny, Vesuvius smouldering over Naples, summer holidays in the south of France. He also liked a pretty blonde, especially if painted by Renoir. But the show begins with a tremendous late Manet and ends with an equally momentous Degas. Clark's taste could be strange and distinctive.
He did not, for instance, simply collect the usual Corot landscapes that Americans adore, those sun-dappled reveries of high skies and silvery tree trunks picked out against soft receding leaves. He bought an eerie view of Rome in the late afternoon that seems shot through with melancholy, dust and age, and a superb portrait of a girl sitting by the road in a voluminous grey costume who seems overwhelmed in every respect.
He did not collect only the lightsome Monet, but early works like Seascape: Stormwith its lead-grey clouds glowering over the dark ocean below and a menacing wave, arsenical green, rolling in from the distance so that one fears for the little boat in the foreground.
That green comes from Manet. You'll catch a hint of it in Moss Roses in a Vase, one of those beautifully aphoristic flower pictures made during Manet's long final illness. His subjects were the posies friends brought to his Paris sickroom, in this case a tight bunch of new blossoms beginning to unfurl just as one lies alone and done for on the table below.
Close up, the canvas is a salad of nearly illegible marks. At a distance, the play of light in the vase, the brusque stems and the palpable darkness all coalesce into a mise-en-scène for the flowers themselves: roses with the status – the persona – of people.
There are many famous paintings here: Renoir's Mount Etna, Millet's shepherdess in her monumental stillness, Degas's fantastically nervy Before the Race, showing the riders and horses arriving in good time for the start. Stooping and straining, tense and volatile, this skittery line-up is only just steadied by the regular patches of the jockeys' silk colours.
Clark, incidentally, was so reticent about his purchases that he was better known throughout his life as a horse breeder whose thoroughbred, Never Say Die, won the 1954 Epsom Derby.
These paintings are small, made for the home and not the museum, and this show is scaled to match. It has just over 70 works, displayed with enough space and distance that one can take a close and intimate look into each; noticing the way Daumier lights a man's profile with a faint glow to indicate his adoration for the work of art at which he gazes (bathed in reflected glory, as it were), or the sketchy ochre marks that dance across the blue coat in Renoir's Girl With a Fan, turning it magically to tartan.
Compared to his fellow Americans Duncan Phillips or Alfred Barnes, Clark was unadventurous in that he never bought a Cézanne. And though his stock of Renoirs couldn't rival that of Barnes, he still owned far too many (to my mind) for modern appetites. The pink pulchritude, blond locks and burning black pupils are so excessive one almost looks to the academic genre scenes – Gérôme's The Snake Charmer, Bouguereau's oriental nude – for relief; almost, but of course not quite.
Clark wasn't buying with a public museum in mind. He does not seem to have conceived of his collection in terms of his own reputation down the ages, or worried about whether he might be judged by his eye-popping Monet of tulips fields in full blaze, with its nubbed and knitted surface; as opposed to the infinitely subtle Degas self-portrait in which the young artist appears small, shadowed and secretive beneath his hat – receding inside both the painting and himself.
This show is worth it for the Degas alone – a picture that has never been shown in this country before. You need not travel to the back of beyond to see it. This is one of the wonders of our age – that entire museums can be condensed, edited into miniature versions of themselves and sent around the world like so many postcards. The Royal Academy has mounted such events before, collaborating with other museums in America and Scandinavia. But From Paris is by far the best.