Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape delivers a rather more nuanced and wide-ranging spectacle than its trio of familiar marquee names might initially portend. Drawing solely upon the Royal Academy’s collections and curated by an in-house team, its aim is to chart landscape’s emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England as an ambitious and original art form. Rather than a blockbusting showcase of spontaneous and quintessentially English landscape ‘genius’, a developmental narrative is offered in which engraved reproduction played as crucial a role as painting. In this version of events, compelling market forces burgeoned alongside refined aesthetic theories, and a myriad of talents shaped the art as surely as its most famous triumvirate.

Perhaps intending to capture the excitement and spirit of novelty that accompanied English landscape in its late Georgian heyday, the introductory room features pieces by modern Academicians whose sculptural, graphic, and conceptual engagement with the ‘natural’ environment (precipitous rocks, glacial waterways, and dappled hedgerows) is proposed as a perpetuation of the ‘ close connection between art and nature found in the work of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner ’ . The thesis proper begins in Room II, where the transmission of a seventeenth-century Franco-Italian and Netherlandish canon to a ravenous mid-eighteenth-century visual culture is represented by multiple engraved reproductions of earlier and contemporary make. Here the eye is reacquainted with the various ‘ brands ’ of landscape with which English audiences  grew ever more familiar; the refulgent serenity of Claude Lorrain, the tumble-down rusticity of the Dutch, the bandit-haunted wilderness of Salvator Rosa, and so on. The next room recounts the impact of these models on the productions of the day, felt most obviously in the admiring emulation of classical landscape by the most ambitious proponents (Richard Wilson RA was the key figure) but also in their use to overhaul the mundane yet extremely popular tradition of native topographic imagery. Particularly championed is an octet of 1743 engravings after Thomas Smith of Derby, in which the dramatic highlights of the Peak District are recounted with Rosa-like excess of cragginess and divertingly set off by preciously artificial rococo cartouches. A spacious Room IV arrives at the achievements of Gainsborough, Turner, and Constable, dominating the show by its scale and the number of works on its walls. Show-stopping pictures like Gainsborough’s Romantic Landscape, c.1783, and John Constable’s The Leaping Horse, 1825, are entered in heavy-weight contention with each other, alongside oil sketches, drawings and prints; the underlying purpose here to demonstrate how, under the influence of theories of awe-inspiring ‘ Sublimity ’ and pleasingly irregular ‘ Picturesqueness ’ , these masters effected the ‘ radical transformation of landscape painting … into truthful records of specific locations imbued with emotional, moral and religious resonance ’ . Vitrines are positioned beneath the pictures that assemble letters and studio equipment pertinent to the career of the landscape specialist. In a small off-shoot room, multiple images of gothic ruins and rugged scenery reveal the sheer popularity of the ‘ Picturesque ’ manner from the Regency onwards, its suitability to certain media, and it dissemination through amateur and touristic activities.

Constable, Gainsborough, Turner is not revisionary in intent but it does chime with the priorities of the recent scholarship in the field. By insisting on the importance of the relatively cheap print trade, for example (culminating in Turner’s compendious Liber Studiorum, 1807-25), the show indicates the rapidly broadening economic basis upon which innovations in artistic production were founded. The accompanying booklet includes a brief but informative essay by Andrew Wilton on the mobile dynamic between landscape painters, printmakers, and publishers. More specifically, the exhibition ’ s alertness to the shaping presence of a beloved seicento heritage comes in the wake of Tate Britain’s Turner and the Masters, 2009-10, and the National Gallery’s Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude, 2012. The invitation to compare several contrasting artists’ responses to this tradition is therefore welcome, especially in what was its most easily-accessed, reproduced form. In this respect the works of Wilson, Gainsborough, and of course Turner, display patterns of emulation, adaptation, and demurral although, as this hang reveals, Constable’s attitude to the ‘ Old Master ’ challenge – so slippery to characterise – would reward further questioning.

The depth and quality of the RA print collection is shown to great advantage. To see multiple sets of engravings thus highlighted (the hang throughout is handsome) is to become aware of the scale, presence, and decorative aplomb that landscape reproduction reached in this era. Whereas material of this kind is too often relegated to a secondary role, on this occasion we have a proper opportunity to consider why, amongst other issues, William Woollet and his cunning ‘ worm lines ’ attained a precocious international fame. It is fun, furthermore, to be regaled with the various relics accrued by the RA over the years. Well-known snatches of correspondence such as Gainsborough’s final letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds can be read in the original; the laborious preparatory processes implied by Constable’s slab and muller is a salutary counterpoint to the gorgeous freedom of his (liberally-represented) oil sketches; there is even an opportunity to admire the mechanisms of Turner’s fishing rod!

The strength of the print and paraphernalia display is not, however, repeated in the grander compositions on offer in Room IV. The absence of a big Turner especially robs the show of a climactic, instantly recognisable moment of ‘ Sublimity ’ to make the curators’ case for its centrality to the ascendant art form. After all, it was in large part down to Turner’s thunderstorms, shipwrecks, and avalanches that the English school of landscape found a lasting, even transcendent reputation. Given that, furthermore, the curators invite us to look for unprecedented ‘ emotional, moral and religious resonance ’ at this stage, the omission of that kind of jaw-dropper leaves Gainsborough ’ s suavity, Constable’s elusive effects, and the little antiquarian fragments of the ‘ Picturesque ’ with rather too much to do. Here, of course, the thesis is found to exceed the illustrative capabilities of the RA’s holdings, but I am left wondering, by the same token, whether an opportunity has been missed to let the collection relate its own unique and important part in the genre’s early history. One of the first things we are told is that landscape painting fell well short of the Academy’s official ideal of a morally-motivated, narrative art. Could we not, in that case, have been explicitly invited to consider the routes by which these works in a ‘ minor ’ genre entered such an institutional treasure trove? What, for example, were Gainsborough’s heirs conveying to future generations of artists by donating the Romantic Landscape to this collection in particular? Moreover, as ‘ Diploma Pieces ’ (specimens compulsorily gifted by new Academicians), what aspirations or indeed compromises are embedded in Turner’s rather underwhelming Dolbadern Castle, 1800,or in Constable’s repetition of A Boat Passing a Lock, 1826? If the achievement of the era ’ s landscape art fails fully to materialise in this exhibition, a yet more complex story involving shifting terms of corporate enfranchisement and generic legitimisation is to be found lurking in its lacunae.

‘ Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape ’ is at the Royal Academy, London, from 8 December 2012 to 17 February 2013. Staff-led tours of the exhibition are being offered free with admission 2.30-3.15pm Tuesdays.