Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude

This exhibition pits the London-born Turner against the French antecedent Claude Lorrain, who Turner aspired to better in the field of pure landscape painting. But Turner preferred to be overwhelmed by the great outdoors, rather than merely rendering every inch of foreground, middle ground and background accurately, which Claude managed with the unerring, ubiquitous and artificial eye of Google Earth. The National Gallery’s main crime is representing Turner as a retroactive beast rather than a forward-thinker, intent on his own imaginative, emotional responses to landscape. (OW)