Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude – review

That JMW Turner was profoundly indebted to the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain has never been in doubt. The influence was obvious from the start. Of the many surprising facts about him – that he owned a pub in Wapping, that he had a secret life with an illiterate woman in Chelsea, where his nickname on the streets was Admiral Puggy Booth – the least shocking was this strong French connection. In his day, Turner was even known as the "British Claude".

Nor has this been news since his death in 1851. In his immense and complex bequest, Turner left two landscapes to the nation to be hung next to a pair by Claude so that the affinities would be fully apparent to succeeding generations. You can see them in room 15 of the National Gallery to this day.

What Turner took from Claude is all there at a glance: the aerial view, the graceful staging with great trees on either side and the landscape dissolving into the distance in untraceable gradations, the mastery of hazy golden sunrise and the luminous glow of dusk; Claude's magical light. There is more, of course, but the formula for the ideal poetical landscape Claude more or less invented is clearly established.

Anyone who has already seen this, for free, might well ask what an entire show on the subject is likely to give them for the price of entry. One answer might be a greater familiarity with Claude for those who haven't had much opportunity, in particular with his wonderfully subtle ink-wash views made on the spot (and, not incidentally, beautiful as any late Turner).

Another answer, alas, might be some glum misgivings about the ultimate value of such shows.

Claude Gellée (1600-82) was born in Lorraine, hence the nickname, but known for short as Claude. That he worked his way up from pastry cook in Rome to supreme European landscape painter is glibly cited here as some sort of parallel to Turner's rise from barber's shop to Royal Academy. What they actually share is not humble origins so much as a transcendent vision for the art of landscape.

When Turner saw Claude's Seaport With the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba with its dominating sun – so remote, its rays truly seeming to travel through time to reach these classical ruins by the shore –, he was, according to a witness, "awkward, agitated and burst into tears". The shock of recognition presumably overwhelmed him. But indeed anyone might be moved by this vision of scattered figures watching the slow departure into the faraway light of that world, the sense of an ending is so profound.

And so is the sense of time – or timelessness. Claude paints the Italian countryside as an ancient land of towering trees and toppled monuments in which you might as easily chance upon Narcissus and Echo as encounter a jig of 17th-century peasants. The pale mountains are as ageless as the dark grottoes, the silver tide could be bearing a boat to Naples or Byzantium.

When Turner sees these works – he didn't have to travel for there were hundreds of Claudes in British collections by 1800 – his reaction is immediate. It is not just that he produces his own version of Narcissus, nor that he paints Tivoli on Thames, but that he, too, begins to fuse the past with the present. Linlithgow Palace, for instance, rises like the proverbial fairy castle out of gold-tinged mist. It is a scene both romantic and to a large extent factual. But in the foreground below, a group of male nudes – shirts discarded like togas – bathe in the warm river as if this was ancient Greece and not 19th-century West Lothian.

It is striking to witness this response in the gallery and certain moods common to both artists emerge more distinctly through the alternating display. But the revelations are swiftly over. Infelicities in Turner – his hopelessly static dancers, say – send you to Claude for comparison (as the show urges) and this feels unfair on both painters.

Nor, by the way, does the exhibition have anything to say about the relationship of figures to landscape, which is surely more interesting than the old lecture about suns and stage-sets. Spectators, mythical heroes, workers, passing angels: none appears rooted in the landscape; at their best, these figures have a curious power of suggestion, inspiring a vision of the landscape when there is nobody there.

Turner's obsession with Claude was lifelong and blatant. The curators stick with it from first to last, which is admirable in terms of scholarship but restricts the show to the kind of Turners one might not always seek out: glaucous sunsets, weak allegories, soaring black trees where the paint glistens like tar, scenes where he has put everything into appearing lusciously foreign and ended up entirely unpersuasive.

And although there are magnificent Claudes, including some from private collections, his radicalism barely comes over. In this context, Claude looks like a painter with a special interest in ruins and skies who will soon to be eclipsed by the sun-worshipping Turner.

Nothing comes of nothing in art; every painter has his or her influences. To take this truth to exhibition length – no matter how riveting the technicalities may be to some – is to risk both simplification and overstatement. Turner and Picasso have lately been the subject of four such exhibitions, each a more reductive compare-and-contrast exercise than the last; this one is the narrowest.

Even for those determined to keep the two properly separate in mind – the limpid philosophy of Claude; the extraordinary dematerialisations of Turner – the eye is inevitably directed against it. Here, Claude looks more serene; there, Turner looks more visionary; comparisons are invited on principle. This vice is most exposed in a room full of sunsets in fortuitous sequence – going, going, gone – where the emphasis can hardly help being the group phenomenon, rather than individual painting or painter. This is not the best way to present art.