Landscape painting is so popular a subject for art these days we forget it was not always so. History painting used to be number one in the hierarchy of art, painted in the grand manner awash with rhetoric and high ideals. Portraiture came next, making good money for the artist in the 18th century, the greatest age for the genre in Britain. Then came landscape, of much lower status, at least until the later 18th century.

Enter three leading lights of the art of landscape painting — Thomas Gainsborough, JMW Turner, and John Constable — and landscape’s gradual move towards acceptance not simply as an idealised backdrop to scenes of myth or history, or a visual symbol of a portrait-sitter’s world, but as a subject for painting in its own right. Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape, the Royal Academy’s autumn exhibition now in its final weeks, follows these three innovative Royal Academicians and others — Richard Wilson, Michael Angelo Rooker and Paul Sandby among them — to explore the origins of our British landscape tradition. Its challenges included painters addressing the changing meaning of “truth to nature”. Featuring about 120 works from the Academy’s collections, it shows paintings, prints, books and letters, and sundry items from Turner’s travelling paint box to the fishing rod he used to take with him on sketching trips. Since its foundation in 1768, all newly-elected Royal Academicians donate a Diploma Work to the Royal Academy’s Collection. Turner’s was Dolbadern Castle (1800), a brooding painting of a castle silhouetted against an ill-omened backdrop. A cluster of tiny figures in the foreground hint at some sorry tale. It represents one of the shifts in style of landscape painting that occurred during the period covered by the show, mid-18th to mid-19th century. Using his sketches from his tours of Wales in the 1790s, in Dolbadern Castle Turner employs a creative approach to painting landscape — combining great emotional charge and the sublime with topographical accuracy. Interested in philosopher Edmund Burke’s theories of the sublime, Turner aimed to capture in his work something of the awe-inspiring nature of landscape, here using scale and tonality to this effect. It is shown alongside two great 1820s landscapes by his rival Constable — The Leaping Horse and Boat Passing a Lock. While Turner had been a teenager when he was accepted by the Royal Academy, Constable struggled, only becoming a full member at the age of 53. But meanwhile Constable forged his own path: a highly personal one based on his beloved Suffolk landscape, his style in complete contrast to the classical tradition that was Turner’s. “Constable was absolutely determined to paint in a natural, more homely tradition [like the Dutch],” curator MaryAnne Stevens explained. “His work carried intense emotion and personal connections for him. Notice how in The Leaping Horse, a scene of a tow horse pulling a barge along the river, the viewpoint shifts from one that’s above and passive, looking down — as most landscapes — to one that’s actually, physically, in the landscape.”

Constable was a great admirer of Gainsborough. Moved by his ability to convey emotion and empathy as well as grandeur in a scene, he found Gainsborough’s landscapes “soothing, tender and affecting”, and that on looking at the “stillness of noon, the depths of twilight” in them, “we have tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them”. Gainsborough’s darkly affecting Romantic Landscape (c.1783) is in this show. You have until February 17 to see what emotions it stirs today.

Royal Academy, John Madejski Fine Rooms Until February 17 royalacademy.org.uk THREE STARS