All Gardening Is Landscape Painting

A ccording to traditional art history, before the mid-18th century the British simply couldn't paint. The best artists at work on these shores were all foreign, from Holbein and Van Dyck to Orazio Gentileschi and Peter Lely. In this account, the first original native painter was Hogarth, and the first genre to be distinctively British was landscape painting. Even in this we were no better than we ought to be: landscape was a lowly genre, some way below the salt, while history painting with its moral and didactic qualities lorded it at the head of the table. As Sir Joshua Reynolds, the man who sought above all others to put British painting on a par with the rest of Europe, said: "A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great."

Reynolds's fiefdom, the Royal Academy, is now putting on an exhibition that examines the origins and evolution of the British landscape tradition and why it took such a hold on the public imagination. The 120 works in Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and the Making of Landscape have all been drawn from the academy's own voluminous collection, making it the first fully home-grown show at Burlington House for 50 years.

There is nothing particularly new about either the theme or the participants. The birth of the Georgian landscape in art, literature and gardening has been minutely examined down the years. This exhibition's three big names are all familiar; indeed, after Turner and Claude at the National Gallery and Turner, Monet and Twombly at Tate Liverpool, this is the third show this year to present Turner in company with other artists – it's as if he is no longer safe to be let out on his own. Nor was the Royal Academy always so keen on its headline acts. While Turner, from child prodigy until his death, was an academician through and through, both Gainsborough and Constable had fractious relationships with the institution. The latter once had to sit silently as a member of the RA rejected one of his paintings because it was "a nasty green thing". He was elected a full academician only aged 53 and even then by just one vote.

Where this exhibition seeks to differentiate itself is in looking at the role that prints played in popularising the genre and branding the painters. It also stresses how the taste for landscape was present before there were painters to satisfy it. Grand Tourists had brought home numerous works by the great practitioners of continental Europe Nicolas Poussin, his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain. The poet James Thomson lauded their different styles – "What e'er Lorrain light-touched with softening hue, / Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew" – and their effect on British painters was profound. Constable, Turner and Gainsborough all studied Claude and his landscapes of the Roman campagna in particular; Constable, indeed, became so besotted that he once wrote to his wife: "I do not wonder at your being jealous of Claude – if anything could come between our love it is him." Turner, meanwhile, bequeathed numerous of his paintings to the nation on condition that two should be hung alongside a pair of Claudes in the National Gallery.

So it was through emulation rather than a burgeoning of native spirit that what another poet, William Cowper, described as "Italian light on English walls" came to be painted. When it did, it appeared in several varieties. The birth of British landscape painting was heralded by an interest in aesthetic theory too. In 1757 Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which, in turn, towards the end of the century, led to the theory of the picturesque championed by William Gilpin. For landscape artists, the sublime was essentially the evocation of awe and terror, the beautiful meant soft and aesthetically pleasing, while the picturesque – literally "in the manner of a picture" – was defined as irregular, ragged and asymmetrical.

These categorisations helped to spread a new appreciation of the British countryside, and Wales, the Lake District and Scotland became crowded with tourists in search of picturesque views. The situation intensified when the advent of the revolutionary wars in France closed off mainland Europe. Early adopters who helped to reveal the potential of the British landscape included Richard Wilson, who had lived in Italy and brought his understanding of classical landscape painting to bear on his native land, and Thomas Smith of Derby, whose pictures of the Peak District showed undreamed-of drama.

If there was one picture that was the fons et origo of the British school it was Wilson's The Destruction of Niobe and her Children, painted in 1760. It showed the daughter of Tantalus suffering the punishment of the gods for boasting about the beauty and number of her children. In a rocky coastal landscape with the sky split by lightning and under a storm-shaken tree, Apollo and Diana pick off their mortal victims with their arrows. The painting, and the print after it of extraordinary quality by William Woollett, caused a sensation: this was no topographical piece but a noble if fictitious landscape, which, when combined with a mythological scene that together had a moral, emotional and intellectual message. It was landscape painting with aspirations. Wilson was to die in drink and in poverty, but his example didn't. Neither did Woollett's; his technical experimentation won him both money and praise, even among the French. Like Wilson, he served as an inspiration to succeeding generations of engravers.

It was against this background that Gainsborough, Turner and Constable painted, and each took a different approach. Gainsborough (1727-88) painted the sedate countryside of his native Suffolk, treating it in more in the modest, naturalistic manner of 17th-century Dutch artists than that of the French and Italians. Although he painted real places, landscapes were a form of release. He wrote to a friend that: "'I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gam and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips …" And when he couldn't, he simply made them up using little mises-en-scène of mirrors for water, coal for rocks, moss for greenery and broccoli for trees and finessed them into woodland settings.

Constable (1776-1837), his fellow East Anglian, was more thoroughgoing. For all his admiration for Claude he refused to be always "running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand". He painted the places he loved best and because he believed that no two leaves of a tree were ever "alike since the creation of the world" his method was one of minute observation. His blood-and-soil approach did not endear him to the RA, which objected to his refusal to "elevate" his subject matter; but the work he submitted on eventually being elected, Boat Passing a Lock, shows not just his fidelity to the changing appearance of nature but his emotional attachment to the countryside of his birth.

Turner (1775-1851) too started as a topographer before picking up his Claudean inheritance. Where Gainsborough called figures in landscape paintings "a little business for the eye", Turner saw them as intrinsic to his pictures' meaning, whether it be Hannibal and his soldiers crossing the Alps in a snowstorm or, in his brooding diploma piece for the RA, Dolbadern Castle (1800), the medieval Welsh prince Owain Goch ap Gruffydd. While Constable never left England, Turner scoured Italy, France and Switzerland for grand landscapes that he could treat in the traditional classicising manner – a foreground tree framing some human figures and a middle distance with, say, a river or a castle for interest, and a distant blue horizon. Even at his most idealising, however, as he sought to impart nobility of sentiment to his scenes, he kept a real landscape at the heart of the picture.

It is one of the asides of this exhibition that Turner, the most technically radical of the three painters, was also the most traditional and that he was never the abstract expressionist avant la lettre he is often now made out to be. As if to prove the point about his establishment mentality, the exhibition also includes Turner's well-used fishing rod: revolution and angling don't seem natural bedfellows. The rivers that appear so often in his pictures he knew intimately from a bankside position, when he wasn't drawing them he was fishing them (his regular companion was the architect Sir John Soane).

The three men's attitudes towards the prints that advertised their names differed, too. Although Gainsborough never sold a print from his own hand he was technologically curious, happily experimenting with the differences between etching, soft-ground etching and aquatint as means of reproducing the effects of drawing or painting. Prints as a marketable commodity were of less interest to him.

Turner and Constable, on the other hand, took them very seriously. Constable struck up a close relationship with his chief printmaker, David Lucas, whose mezzotints of the painter's work were published as Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery (1830–32). So skilled was Lucas at translating colour into light and shade – the chiaroscuro that Constable called "that power which creates space; we find it everywhere and at all times in nature" – that Constable claimed Lucas achieved the effects he himself wanted to but couldn't manage.

Turner mezzotint — JMW Turner's etching and mezzotint *Norham Castle on the Tweed*, 1816 Photograph: Royal Academy of Arts, London

Turner's printmaking centred on his Liber Studiorum (1807-19), a book of a projected 100 plates to demonstrate the expressive power of landscape (Constable grumpily and jealously referred to it as the "Liber Stupidorum"); the title was inspired by Claude's similar project, the Liber Veritatis. He divided his plates into categories such as "Historical", "Pastoral" and "Marine" and micromanaged his engravers to such an extent that when dissatisfied with their work he both engraved and mezzotinted some of the plates himself. During the course of this and subsequent projects, he trained a cadre of British printmakers skilled in representing the effects of paint and watercolour in line and tone that was the envy of Europe.

This intense little exhibition may be devoid of blockbusters but it is rich: the birth of the artist entrepreneur, the end of the established method of patronage and the democratisation of the landscape are among the themes hiding among the more natural beauties of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner's woods, fields and hills.