‘Aerial Claude’ was Turner’s name for the seventeenth-century painter, Claude Gellée, Le Lorrain: a nomination that points to the elements of air and light that he admired in the master’s paintings and sought to imitate and to exceed in his own. The pursuit of the effects of light upon landscape became his life’s work, although he allowed much worse weather into his own canvases, so that the quiet crepuscular glades of Claude’s Roman Campagna are transformed by Turner, even early in his career, into changeful moments of meteorological contingency: his sun is vanishing behind threatening clouds, his landscape is curtained by rain, or his dark sea is obscured under a damp night mist. John Constable wrote in bewildered awe of Turner in 1836 that, ‘he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy,’ although he also complained that ‘Turner is too yellow.’ The characteristic yellows and blues on a bright white canvas of Turner’s later oils, so unlike the soft palette of Claude, are in fact in short supply in this exhibition, which has selected its Turners from those examples which borrow from or refer most explicitly to Claude. Only a couple of the later water colours of Venice, from 1840, pulsating with that astonishing yellow, begin to suggest that Turner’s driving obsession is really with the sun, rather than with Claude. The catalogue note on these watercolours tells us that ‘Turner’s natural reference point was the glaring light that pervades and gilds everything in Claude’s Seaports.’(p.131) But perhaps this was not the ‘natural reference point’, or not the only one, for Turner by 1840?

The exhibition is peculiarly insistent, even a little clingy, in the way it wants to maintain a relationship of imitation between these two artists, rather than one of inspiration and departure. The result of this narrow selection of Turner’s work is a sadly skewed representation of the later artist, with two great exceptions which are well worth the entrance price. Regulus (1828, reworked 1837) is a painting which startlingly imagines the effects of glaring light upon the tortured Regulus who has just had his eyelids cut off. In 1837 Turner returned to this canvas to build up the sun with his then characteristic scumbled paint until, as Ian Warrell says in the catalogue, ‘all is glare, turbulence and uneasiness.’ It is more, perhaps, even than uneasiness: this seems an extraordinary attempt to paint pain and shock. The other is Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night, (1835) on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which shows the muddy waters of the River Tyne transformed by moonlight into liquid silver, an accidental alchemy unremarked upon by the busy workers to the right of the picture who are absorbed by their shovelling of heavy coal by the light of oil lamps. But if it were not for these two self-evidently brilliant canvases, it might be possible to come out of this exhibition with an idea of Turner as a somewhat belated and obedient nineteenth-century copyist.

The ‘artist’s artist’ exhibition theme has been popular in London recently and elsewhere both Turner and Picasso have been displayed alongside the ‘Old Masters’ from whom they learned. The particular ‘artist’s artist’ relationship between Claude and Turner was famously established in perpetuity by Turner himself when he directed in his will that his Dido building Carthage (1815) and his Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish (Before 1807) should be hung next to Claude’s Seaportwith the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and the beautiful Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, both from 1648. And so they still are, in Room 15 of the Gallery, in a strangely anachronistic display which takes us back to late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century hangs, when pictures ancient and modern jostled together on collectors’ walls, before modern museological taxonomies dictated that they should be hung chronologically and categorised by nation of production. The current temporary exhibition is a kind of multiple iteration of this permanent display.

And it is not just Turner whose work seems diminished here. Claude also suffers. To see so many of his important works gathered together is a rare treat but the labelling and catalogue essays tell us little about these pictures. The focus of both is clearly on Turner. Turner’s post-Gibbon relationship to the classical past is necessarily vastly different to Claude’s, about which little is said. Claude was always a popular artist with British collectors, and Turner was able to see his paintings in private houses in England even before travel to Continental Europe became easier after the Napoleonic wars. Indeed, in 1820 it is estimated that more than half of Claude’s 300 paintings were in Britain, so popular had they been with eighteenth-century collectors who prized their virtuoso classical pastorals and picturesque compositions of landscape. By the mid-nineteenth century, John Ruskin was particularly scathing about this old-fashioned fashion. He saw Claude’s monomania for painting sunlight as evidence of his lack of greatness, ‘his discovery of the way to make pictures look warm was very delightful to the shallow connoisseurs of the age,’ he explained confidently in Modern Painters, ‘[n]ot that they cared for sunshine; but they liked seeing jugglery. They could not feel Titian’s noble colour, nor Veronese’s noble composition; but they thought it highly amusing to see the sun brought into a picture: and Claude’s works were bought and delighted in by vulgar people then, for their real-looking suns, as pictures are now by vulgar people for having real timepieces in their church towers.’ Ruskin considered that Turner’s compositions were ‘weakened and corrupted’ by the influence of Claude. But it is telling, perhaps, that the novelist and collector William Beckford desired that Fonthill Abbey should be decorated by De Loutherberg, Martin or Turner: surely at that point a catalogue of contemporary ‘showman painters’. The artist Philip James De Loutherberg was known for his dramatic paintings of fire and sea battles, and was also the creator of the Eidophusikon, a miniature mechanical theatre which created ‘Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures,’ while John Martin’s apocalyptic and spectacular canvases were exhibited as ticketed shows and adapted into stage sets. Beckford clearly thought the young Turner was a painter of similar trompe l’oeil show effects. And because this exhibition does not supply the contexts to understand the radicalism of either of these painters, it ends by foregrounding the very ‘special effects’ that Ruskin scorned, and which both painters transcended.

In fact, both were impressively engaged with the modernities and novelties of their respective times. Turner’s signature yellow, for example, owes much to his friendship with the scientist Michael Faraday who encouraged him to experiment with the new chemical alkaline-based yellows that were emerging in the mid-1820s, ‘putting washes and tints of all their pigments in the bright sunlight, covering up one half, and noticing the effect of light and gases on the other.’ Turner learns to experiment with chemistry from Faraday as he learns to experiment with composition from Claude. Both he and Claude are less ‘novelty-painters’ than painters who are striving to see in a new way, fashioning themselves and their work with all the technical knowledge and energy they can muster from multiple sources. In insisting narrowly but exhaustively on only one line of influence, this exhibition risks seriously misrepresenting Turner, while leaving Claude’s own aesthetic investments unexamined. The pictures alone make it well worth a visit, but finally this is a show that does both too much and too little.

‘Turner Inspired: in the Light of Claude’ is at The National Gallery, London, 14 March to 5 June 2012.