Art - Ned Denny is relieved by the lack of prettiness in Pissarro's suburban landscapes

If impressionism really is "the most popular artistic movement in history" (the faintly absurd self-claim for "The Road to Impressionism" at the Wallace Collection), then it is also the most badly misapprehended. It may well now be the inevitable fate of all radical art, every stab at authenticity and intensity, to end up on the mugs, mouse-mats and novelty T-shirts of corporate gift shops. But this should not blind us to the irony of the least ingratiating painters in 19th-century France having become a byword for prettiness - that a movement whose highest value was exposure to nature has been relegated to the status of domestic eye-candy. Naturally, there are those who see the commercialisation of high art as benign, some kind of cultural victory even. The best answer to this was that given by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, first published in 1964 but as damningly pertinent as ever. "Coming to life as classics," he writes, "they come to life as something other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth." If the price of popularity is emasculation, then the "victory" is a pyrrhic one.

"The Road to Impressionism" is doing its bit for the rebranding of the movement as a paragon of niceness, claiming to find its origins in the work of some decidedly minor French painters of the mid-19th century. This is wrong on a number of counts. First, it perpetrates the cosy myth (long beloved of English critics) that the great revolutions in art were not revolutions at all. Emphasising continuity with the past, this kind of revisionist thinking seems as scared of the impressionists' innovations as were the fulminating critics of the 1870s. Then there is the fact that the decisive influence on French art of the period came from over the Channel, from Turner's spectral radiance and Constable's fearless delineations of stone, thicket and brutal light. Finally, there is the small problem of the paintings themselves. To be fair, there are some charming little landscapes here, but the delicacy and underlying slickness of a work such as Eugene Deshayes's View of a Village among Trees mean that it bears no more than a superficial resemblance to true impressionist painting. As for the rest, it's a funereal selection of Second Empire kitsch, from cloyingly honeyed Arcadias to sentimental scenes of rural life, complete with freshly laundered peasants. Suggesting that all this somehow leads to impressionism is like identifying Marie Antoinette as a key strategist in the French revolution.

This exhibition does, however, restore to the few impressionist works something of their strangeness, their rawness and their modernity. Seen in the context of some proper chocolate-box painting, the "prettiness" of Camille Pissarro's Ferme a Montfoucault: effet de neige (1876) goes out the window. As majestically subtle in its colouring and almost as rigorously faceted as a high cubist work by Braque, it seems to have been painted with a hammer. The scene flickers constantly between illusion in depth and rough brushmarks on a flat plane, as though the world were something dreamt on the surface of a battered wall. Effet de Neige is an elemental poem, a hymn to the nameless tones of the real. Even Renoir, the most sweet-tempered of the impressionists, comes to seem positively scabrous in this company. His Lakeside Landscape (1885-90) is like a world constructed from the feathers of exotic birds, the very soul of tropical light and heat. But most of all - and this is what distinguishes him from the Sunday painters by whom he is surrounded - it is a landscape we cannot enter, whose quivering intensity keeps us firmly at bay.

There is more subtle rewriting of art history in evidence at the National Gallery's "Pissarro in London", a selection of the work he did during a series of stays in the then-new suburbs of the city. Pissarro was well aware of the perils of unhindered industrialisation, and these paintings are quietly heroic studies of the dreary beauty of suburbia. He paints allotments, rail-way sidings and patchy, doomed fields without any attempt to romanticise or prettify, merely noting what he sees with the measured dab of his brushstrokes. There is nothing explicitly political about them, but they depend for their effect on this tension between the numbing ordinariness of the scenery and the paint's modest transfigurations. It is as though he is challenging himself to make a picture from this least propitious of environments, this landscape from which all sublimity has been meticulously erased.

The captions speak of Pissarro's "ready acceptance" of the new developments, but I think this is to misrepresent these brave and complex works. They speak, rather, of art's power to dignify without falsifying, to resist the creeping blandness of modern life.

"The Road to Impressionism" is at the Wallace Collection, London W1 (020 7563 9500) until 3 August

"Pissarro in London" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 2885) until 3 August

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