The greatest British artist ever ...

Jonathan JONES

October 30, 2007 9:15 AM

Turner's Fighting Temeraire - greatest painting in Britain? Photograph: National Gallery/Corbis

Sometimes the obvious is true. For a while I'd been kicking against the simple fact that JMW TURNER is the greatest British artist of all time.

It wasn't that I didn't love his art. It's just that sometimes it's fun to think something different. I've flirted with other great British artists. I've dallied with the unique compression of word and image inBlake's poetic vision. I've been drawn to the icy blood red soul of Francis Bacon, especially after seeing his preserved studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

I tried to convince myself that Holbein and Rubens are "British", and of course fell for the demotic brilliance of Hogarth. But two current exhibitions brought me back to the undeniable truth.

There are some lovely works by Turner in the Paul Mellon memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy. Seeing his painting of a steamship chugging in front of Fingal's Cave in a silken cloud of glowing sea spray is especially revealing, as it hangs beside a dauntingly good picture by his contemporary - and of course his real rival to the crown - John Constable.

It's a fascinating juxtaposition and many will feel Constable comes off best. But, look at the other Turners in the show. Where Constable always ploughs his one deep furrow, there are watercolours here by Turner that are so experimental you don't even guess the artist. He portrays an industrial landscape with Leeds' chimneys belching smoke as ambitiously as he captures the exhilaration of the Alps. If Constable is utterly, magnificently local, Turner's is a truly European mind ranging over history and myth - yet never losing sight of the modern world.

You never see a steamship or a train in Constable's landscape. A poll a couple of years ago found that Turner's Fighting Temeraire is the public's choice of the greatest painting in Britain but really his masterpiece is his painting of a steam train hurtling through the rain that hangs near it in the National Gallery.

If you really want to see how un-British (or at least un-Victorian) Britain's best painter could be, visit Seduced: Art and Sex at the Barbican. Here, next to erotica by Klimt and Picasso, you can see something really rare - the notorious nudes and erotic sketches in Turner's notebooks that his executor, John Ruskin, thought a symptom of madness.

The moralising art critic took it upon himself to destroy Turner's erotic art but here are sensual studies that survive, and it's fascinating to see him portray the world of the bedroom in the same ambiguous light he finds in vistas of sea and sky.

It just proves once again that you can't get to the end of Turner's imagination. Only a fool would resist his Wagnerian symphonic art. It is the best that ever came out of these islands.