From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism, Royal Academy, review The Eastern seaboard of the US is stuffed with art museums. I don't mean the world famous ones in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, but the many small art galleries set in picturesque New England towns, colleges and universities. I really believe there is more art to be seen along the 218 mile corridor that runs from New York to Boston than along any comparable route in the world, including the 189 miles between Rome to Florence. If I had to name my favourite small American museum - for its setting and for the quality of the collection - it would be the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a picture postcard New England town buried deep in the Berkshires, in the northwest corner of the state. The Clark is built on a hill above Williams College, one of the oldest and most beautiful campuses in America. If you time your visit for the late autumn when the leaves are turning, it's a spectacle you will never forget. When it opened in 1955 most Americans had never heard of Mr and Mrs Clark or their collection. Sterling Clark was a Rockefeller-rich aristocrat who began to collect Old Master paintings, sculptures and drawings in Paris before the First World War. This first collection included the most important Piero della Francesca in the US, one of Goya's greatest portraits, and major works by Domenico Ghirlandaio and Luca Signorelli. After the war, with his French wife Francine, he brought the same sure taste and an incredible eye for quality to the collection of French 19th-century painting. From Saturday you can see highlights from the Clarks" Impressionist holdings at the Royal Academy. If ever a show lit up a dreary summer, From Paris: a Taste for Impressionism is it. The Clarks had a knack for buying pictures that were both decorative and painted at pivotal moments in the artist's career. For example, Renoir's delightful Portrait of Madame Monet shows the painter's first wife reading on a floral patterned divan wearing a ravishingly pretty blue Turkish kaftan with Japanese fans fixed to the wall above her. While nodding to the fashionable Japonisme of the period, with luxurious pattern piled upon luxurious pattern, the picture looks forward to the intimate interiors by Bonnard and Vuillard. And I wonder whether the woman sitting alone at a café table with a glass of absinthe in Toulouse-Lautrec's Waiting (1888) was a conscious response to Degas's treatment of the same subject in 1875-76. There is no doubt that the Clarks liked pictures of pretty girls, preferably surrounded by pretty flowers. But the dozen or so chocolate box Impressionist canvases here are offset by a number of purchases that flew in the face of 20th-century canons of good taste: a superb portrait by the society portrait painter Carolus-Duran, for example could almost be mistaken for a Manet. Gerome's perverse essay in orientalist paedophilia, The Snake Charmer, is difficult to look at without embarrassment. There's an academic study of a nude woman by Bouguereau that in this show hangs next to a pink and pretty Renoir nude painted only a few years earlier. And Corot's lovely portrait of a young woman by the roadside will steal your heart - but not every collector would have been as smitten as the Clarks were by her plain face and the fashion catastrophe that is her voluminous travelling coat. For collectors of their generation, the Clarks" taste was essentially conservative. They did not acquire a single work by Cézanne, let alone one by Matisse or Picasso. But in other ways they were remarkably adventurous. Even within the Impressionist circle, they often chose atypical or eccentric pictures. A good example is Monet's Seascape: Storm from 1866-67. With its tonal range of dark green and black intensified by flecks of white, it doesn't look like any other picture Monet ever painted. The way the paint is laid on in broad strokes and slabs, sometimes with a palette knife, is closer to Manet's working method than Monet's. Likewise, Camille Pissarro painted some of his most celebrated works in the last decade of his life, but many mid-20th-century collectors would have passed over his Port of Rouen - Unloading Wood in favour of a prettier rural or suburban vista. We tend to think that the great American collectors of Impressionism made most of their purchases in Europe. But while the Clarks acquired many works in Paris and London, more often they bought from auction houses and at dealers in New York. By displaying the invoices for some of these pictures, the Royal Academy draws attention to the vitality of the American art market in the 20th century and shows, too, that then as now, if you wanted first-rate pictures, you paid for them. So in 1928 the Clarks bought Renoir's Box at the Theatre in New York for $100,000 and in 1951 paid $35,700 for Toulouse-Lautrec's portrait of his red-haired model Carmen. These are colossal prices for pictures by famous artists. But equally, the $140 paid in 1941 for their Carolus-Duran and the $500 for a major picture by Gerome a year later shows what bargains could be had for collectors guided by the quality of the picture and not the name of the artist. From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism isn't going to tell you a great deal you didn't know. But it certainly gives you a taste of what you can expect to find in New England if you venture off the beaten track. The Clark Institute may be located in be back of beyond - but what a beyond! Until September 23