Degas at the ballet at the Royal Academy

The first thing you notice when you strap on your audio tour at the Royal Academy's blockbuster autumn exhibition 'Degas at the ballet' is that you have been mispronouncing 'Degas' for years as day-gah. Apparently, if you are qualified enough to record an audio tour for the RA then you are qualified enough to risk pronouncing it 'Digger'. Little did I know that this master of capturing movement and Parisian dancers is apparently the most famous Australian painter since Rolf Harris.

I love audio tours, and in this case, with the subject so often the ballet, the audio tour really lends to the sense of occasion. You have the ballet dancers on the canvas, ballet music in your ears and, by the time you reach the final gallery, every little girl in the place is attempting ballet poses, inspired by the images and dreaming of being the next Darcy Bussell or Angelina Ballerina, depending on cultural reference points or age.

Back on the walls, I was coming to the conclusion that Digger certainly had some chops. His paintings include devices to lead your eye around the picture, with figures and structures vanishing out of frame. My personal favourite was a painting of a night at a ballet about, this being France, naughty nuns. In the foreground of the picture the great and the; good bearded ballet goers sit and chat or watch the nuns whirling, their movements blurred in an uncanny anticipation of trying to capture fast motion on film. One of the patrons is in profile, holding a pair of opera glasses and directing his gaze not to the stage but sideways, out of frame to, one supposes, his mistress's box.

With its capturing of a moment in time, of society, of movement and music, it's a stunning piece of art, but if you had commissioned a painting of a famous ballet that included erotic nuns, and were presented with portraits of a bunch of old blokes, one might feel a little ripped off.

Digger's painting career was taking off at the same time as the development of photography, both still and moving, and the science of photography was just turning into an art. The exhibit was as much about photography as it was about girls in tutus and in terms of informing context, was excellent. What was also clear was the beauty of the cameras back in the early days, little mahogany cameras that were more furniture than something to snap your holiday photographs.

One of the things that most impressed was the 360 degree portrait. Surrounded by cameras, the subject was photographed from all angles simultaneously. It's a pity that they had to wait another hundred years before the technology would exist to animate these and project them as a film, as I reckon the Matrix movies would have been greatly improved if Neo was a portly gentleman wearing a top hat and a beard the size of a cumulus cloud.

The paintings were, though, magnificent. This was the greatest painter of the dancing figure painting at a time where the world of capturing movement was changing forever. Even more wonderful than the paintings were the sculptures, originally created as wax figurines for reference and private contemplation, cast in bronze they were simply stunning.

One could not help but wonder about Digger's sexuality. Luckily, for somebody who spent so much of his time painting young ballet dancers, he appears to have been a confirmed fan of musical theatre. At least I could see no reference to a marriage, then again, if I was famous, and with a flick of a brush make a ballet dancer famous too, why get married? Private in his habits, most of the pictures of him are from his own experiments with photography, showing him and his friends either sitting stiffly for portraits, or clowning around for the camera. The catalogue also has a photograph of him emerging from a gent's loo, the significance of this is not clear and parallels with former Wham! front man George Michael end there as, as far as I am aware, Digger never got out of his skull on weed and decided to drive his horse and carriage at speed into a photo booth or whatever it was.

My one complaint - it was not French enough (there were French people there, enjoying themselves, who had no doubt come by Eurostar to see how a really good exhibit is curated), although the final film, a ten second loop of Digger being papped on his doorstep, was good, the street was full of French people and signs for little bakeries and coffee shops, and it was so Parisian you could almost smell the dog shit, but the Van Gough exhibition was the equivalent of gargling with red wine and rubbing onions underneath your armpits, it was that French.