Turner and the Masters

For the first time, this is JMW Turner seen in the company of his masters, as well as with a couple of friends. He briefly worked, and even collaborated on the same paintings, with a contemporary watercolourist, Thomas Girtin, but, as this exhibition explains, Turner spent the rest of his career learning and assimilating the lessons of his artistic forebears: especially Claude, Poussin and Rembrandt.

What Turner's early allegorical scenes lack in feeling - the protagonists look like actors pasted clunkily on to the foreground - is made up for in his treatment of the backgrounds, with the wild rocking waves and sunlit horizon elevating his 'Dutch Boats in a Gale' over that of the painter he copied from. The problem with such side-by-side comparisons (as evidenced by the pointless 'Turner/Rothko' ding-dong at Tate earlier in the year) is that pictures are reduced to greater-than or lesser-than versions, or spurious games of spot-the-difference. His influences are instructive, but it was Turner's ability to forge light from oil paint and transcend subject matter through dazzling brush effects that surpassed all but the best Old Masters.

Turner's vapourous version of Poussin's 'Deluge', for example, is a disaster movie of a painting - depicting a Boschian vision of man's capitulation to nature - while the Italian's earlier scene (hardly his best) is a soap opera, dealing only with the human drama of a child being saved from the rains or a drowning man clinging to his horse. Turner didn't do this kind of detail, preferring the sfumato technique of blurring and muddying colours, so his figures emerge and submerge, rarely seeming real. Certainly he couldn't paint faces convincingly, which led to many uncomfortable views of people's backs.

In pure landscape terms, Turner met his match in Claude Lorrain, whose work apparently reduced the cocky cockney to tears. His soft-focus version of Claude comes off all corny and romantic, while his narratives couldn't compete with Rembrandt's or Watteau's. Happily, Turner doesn't stay chocolate-boxy for too long - the final room of Claude slugging it out with Turner is bliss - and the show doesn't pop the bubble of his genius, but merely gives the assumption of his greatness a good, testing squeeze. 'Turner and the Masters', then, allows us to come to his appreciation afresh (away from a maestro whose name was taken in vain by the Turner Prize), even if the obvious conclusion is that there's none finer in the depiction of atmosphere and landscape than our own greatest of all time.