Be selective

Corot to Monet
National Gallery, until 20 September

The second room contains a magnificent Turner entitled ‘The Evening Star’, superbly atmospheric despite the out-of-proportion foreground figure with dancing dog. Note the dissolving definitions of dusk: beach, water and sky, while retaining their separate identities, begin to move into each other, eliding and blurring beautifully. Next to it is Constable in a very different mood, on Hove beach, with a pale, airy Bonnington below. In this room, Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz de la Pena comes into his own, a Barbizon plein-air painter with a feeling for storm and pictorial drama. Turn to Millet’s contemplative ‘Winnower’ for contrast, or ‘Tree Study’ by Jean-Michel Cels. In room 3, there’s more Barbizon School painting and some fine late Corots, painted in quite a different style and palette. Here the silvery tones of tree trunks and foliage in puffs of grey convey a more poetic approach to landscape that some will dismiss as fey. Courbet is the antidote: an angry sunset and wonderful sky on Lake Geneva, or the ghostly modern-looking landscape by Théodore Rousseau.

The last room moves towards Impressionism and Monet’s key small painting ‘The Beach at Trouville’. Here again Corot is well represented with his four studies of ‘Times of Day’ on the end wall; the most vigorous is ‘Night’, freer in its modelling, with the trees interestingly reduced for clarity. In this room is a Monet painting of bathers, which makes a very interesting comparison with Seurat’s great Bathers, a group of three Boudin beach scenes, views of London by Monet and Daubigny (compare the different fog effects), and a deliciously free painting of a valley by the little-known Philippe Rousseau. For the discerning, a final group of Corots (there are 20 in the exhibition), with ‘Souvenir of Palluel’ so blond as almost to be disappearing in light. There was a painter who looked hard at nature but then painted from deep within himself.