Impressionists by the Sea Royal Academy, London, until 30 Sept  Is it possible to look at Monet, the master of the mug tree and the mousemat, in a new light? That is one principal question asked by yet another Impressionist show at the Royal Academy. The answer, oddly, is yes. Impressionists by the Sea is a quietly provocative look at the origins of the movement on the Normandy coast. It reveals the plein-air painters as one product of the small social revolution begun by the opening up of the railways. The artists who came here - Courbet, Whistler, Manet, Renoir, as well as Monet - were in the vanguard of a new tourist trade, propagandists for the novel idea that life was a beach.  This transformation of the coast is seen most clearly in the life of Eugene Boudin who had grown up in the fishing village of Honfleur. Boudin's father had been a sailor, and he too had worked at sea before he saw a different future arriving by steam train from Paris. Boudin opened an art shop and began painting to exploit the excitement of the new resorts that welcomed the capital's society under big skies. When he exhibited at the Salon, one critic observed: 'Spending the summer by the sea is a wholly new craze... M. Boudin is the first to have captured and preserved for us this piquant aspect of modern life, and he has done it artistically, without being distracted by small details.'  Visitors to the beach have long wanted to take the light and the life of vacation back home with them, and Boudin began supplying that market in earnest. A representative painting shows the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, and her somewhat windswept entourage at Trouville in 1863. The beach, Boudin's painting suggests, is a great leveller. As the Empress's group bustles along the sand in crinoline and silk, fussing with parasols, none of their fellow holidaymakers gives them a second glance, preferring to take in sun and sea.  Boudin had been persuaded to paint outdoors by his Dutch friend Johan Barthold Jongkind, who had come to stay and work here a decade earlier. Jongkind's paintings of the 1850s show a very different society to the one that arrived by train. His pair of pictures at Fecamp and Etretat detail hard working lives of fishing families, the grind of nets and bait. The tension between these competing visions of the coastline, as a place of work and play, an unspoken class war, is the argument that runs through much of the work collected here.  Courbet felt the pull of both impulses. His letters home suggested that by the early 1860s things in Trouville could hardly have been more congenial for the aspiring artist. 'The Casino has given me a splendid apartment overlooking the sea and I paint portraits of the prettiest women...' he explained, breathlessly. 'I have already painted the portrait of the Comtesse Karoly of Hungary. More than 400 ladies came to see it and some 10 of the most beautiful of them would like their own painted. They [will] pay me 1,500 francs apiece...'  Despite this lucrative and engaging stream of clients, Courbet was drawn to the wilder aspects of the place; in the winter of 1865 and 1866 he stayed in Normandy with his protege Whistler and the pair of them swam in the wild cold sea in the mornings and painted it in the afternoons; a total immersion which yielded Courbet's extraordinary and ominous 'The Waterspout', a Rothko of greys, and Whistler's equally liquid 'Sea and Rain', the two looming highlights of this collection.  Twenty years later, Monet attempted something of the same with Etretat, Rainy Weather, but by then the more genteel aspects of the coastal resorts had generally held sway over the brooding mass of ocean, and his heart did not seem quite in it. Monet had learned much of what he knew of the dappling optimism of light from Boudin. When he honeymooned with his wife Camille at Trouville in 1870 his snapshot paintings of her beside the sea are little eyebright odes to joy, a mood which persists in some of his picture postcard painting of the region in subsequent years: sunsets on the shingle at Pourville, inviting primrose paths down to sporty seas dotted with yachts. The summer exhibition may be on in the galleries next door, but rarely has the season looked as freshly made as it appears here.
Art: Monet, Courbet and Boudin's scenes of the early tides of coastal tourism bring a refreshing look to their movement, writes Tim Adams.