Few great painters have wrestled as long and hard with the art of the past as J.M.W. Turner. “Turner and the Masters” is a positively forensic examination of the painter’s multiple, magpie borrowings from the work of painters as various as Ruisdael and Rembrandt, Claude Lorraine and Raphael, Titian and Watteau. A study in oedipal striving, the show will inevitably be compared to last year’s blockbuster at the Grand Palais in Paris, “Picasso and the Masters”. But it tells a very different story.

 

From the very start of his career, he turned to the work of other artists for instruction and inspiration. He studied the macabre mid-eighteenth century prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, broodingly dark depictions of prisons and ruins, and brought the same spirit of romantic theatre to his own fitfully glimmering watercolours of England’s Gothic cathedrals. Branching out into landscape painting, he went to Rembrandt for schooling in chiaroscuro, and to Willem van de Velde the Younger for lessons in painting the rough and tumble of the sea. Seeking to attach himself to the higher traditions of idealised landscape and grand narrative painting, he looked to such painters as Raphael and Poussin. Turner’s idiosyncratic, rough-edged brilliance, as well as many of his weaknesses – his renowned inability to draw the human figure, for example – can be explained by the fact that he was a pure autodidact.

 

The truth is that no other artist of comparable stature has ever walked such a precarious tightrope between pastiche and personal innovation. Yet even when his borrowings or adaptations are at their most outrageously self-evident, Turner’s own artistic personality shines through with a bizarre and touching constancy. He was preoccupied to the point of obsession with light, fascinated by its flickering insubstantiality. So strong was that obsession that it always devoured and transformed whatever artistic model Turner set himself to emulate.

So it was that he painted incandescent Claudes and melted Titians; and that he inadvertently set the calmly classical world of Raphael on fire. He genuinely tried to create pictures that looked like other artists’ pictures, but he always ended up filling them with his own fireworks. The true moral of Tate Britain’s exhibition is that was precisely through his failure to mimic those whom he admired that he ended up realising his own genius and his own destiny.

Turner was one of the most revolutionary artists of the entire nineteenth century. Yet his originality went against the grain of another, more conservative aspect of his personality – a part of him that yearned above all to be part of tradition, rather than depart from it. In the end, however, he could not resist the strength of his own vision. He had spent his life moving towards the crystallisation of a single radical insight, one which was destined to turn not just Western painting but Western thought itself on its head. Before Turner, light in painting existed to model objects. But Turner overturned that idea as completely as Einstein would overturn the preconceptions of conventional physics. Turner dared to suggest that the world of solid objects was no more than a shifting, transitory series of accidents. He dared to show that it was light and light alone that was the true constant of the universe. A quarter of a century after his death, the French Impressionists grasped the same point and Western art was changed forever.

At the end of “Turner and the Masters”, the artist untethers himself altogether from what Harold Bloom christened  “the anxiety of influence”. In works such as Regulus and Snow-Storm at Sea he pushes his depictions of the world as a tumult of light far beyond anything to be found in the Old Master canon. At this point, the organisers of the show might have stepped back from their own academic project and committed themselves to an ending as bold as that of Turner’s own career – leaving the artist all alone, with no one but himself for company, lost in a hypnotising world of light. But they continue with their beetle-browed comparisons to the end, juxtaposing the asembled Turners with yet another Claude here, yet another Ruisdael there. They could have allowed the painter one last moment of transcendence. He worked hard enough for it.