Romantics, Tate Britain

Everyone likes a “lost treasure” story, a story where something missing for hundreds of years turns up in an unexpected place, bringing sudden riches to the lucky finder. In the 1970s, a purchaser of an old railway timetable found, tucked inside the book, eight hand-coloured etchings, which were quickly identified as rare images by William Blake. On top of the etchings Blake had used watercolour and then tempera, then pen and ink, thus making these one-off images that had been hidden for the best part of two centuries.

Tate Britain acquired these images last year, and now they are displayed as part of a major re-hang of the Clore Galleries, to create a new look at the art-world of Britain in the Romantic period. Anyone who has regularly visited the Tate will find little that is new, however, apart from the Blake images. The early and late Turners have been assigned their own galleries, and the works are always worth a visit, even if the oatmeal-coloured walls make Turner’s colours darken and muddy. The room that focuses on Constable and his contemporaries has wonderful plein-air sketches: Constable’s Beaching a Boat, Brighton (1824) is a terrific proto-Impressionist sketch; his Cloud Study (1822), a rapid-fire study of the sky, would be thrilling if it weren’t killed stone-dead by its heavy gilt frame; and Turner’s Study of Sky and Sea, Isle of Wight (1827) is almost more exciting than some of his finished pieces. By contrast, many of the more highly finished images, such as Constable’s Flatford Mill (pictured above) can seem staid.

The Blake images (Book of Urizen, Plate 23, pictured left) are in a room entitled Blake and the Romantic Imagination, and certainly these prints, tiny as they are, pack a more powerful punch than almost anything else nearby (honourable exception: everyone’s favourite Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke). Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom is vast (over three metres by two metres), but is not a prime example of his work: lots goes on, but not much happens in this unfocused Shakespeare homage. By contrast the Blake etchings measure a mere 26 x 18 cm, and say everything and more that Fuseli is too busy to deal with. The power of his figures, as they strain against their frames, fighting their way out of the picture plane to take over the viewers’ minds, is unmistakable. Their colours, kept fresh during their two-century hibernation, are angular and vivid beacons starting off the wall.

It is in the first and last rooms of the Galleries that the visitor really grows frustrated. As always with the Tate, the wall panels and captions run the gamut from opaque to banal. The panel that introduces us to the paintings tells us it uses the term Romanticism “for want of a better one”, and after that shrug of apathy lists what the exhibition will not do: it will “not attempt to be definitive”, nor try to tell a story of the movement, nor show a chronological development. Instead, it will develop “a texture of ideas and themes”. This statement is so woolly, so lacking in meaning, that I cannot say if the show succeeds or not in its aim, because I do not know what that aim is. Further panels then add banalities to apathy – artists’ lives were “more complex than clichés” would suggest. And yet, when the opportunity presents itself to inform, the captions without fail miss every opportunity. A Constable cloud study, says one, has verses under it by Bloomfield. Who is he? asks the viewer. Answer comes there none from Tate curators. (Bloomfield, says the Dictionary of National Biography, was a cobbler-poet who wrote one very successful work, The Farmer’s Boy, a meditation on the agrarian year and the seasons. Whether or not the verses come from there, I have no idea, but would have liked to have been told. Even more, I would have liked to have been told that, like many of the Romantics, urban bustle troubled Bloomfield, who wrote that when in London, “I can write only as Rabbits S—t, in little bits, for the cart wheels roar, and the waiters are noisy”.)

In the final room, works are hung under the general theme of art that was shown at the same time the Romantics were working. So Mulready's genre pictures mix with Eastlake's history pictures, Henry Wallis’s magnificent Chatterton (pictured right) of 1856 hangs next to Joseph Wright of Derby’s equally magnificent but 75-years-previous portrait of Sir Brooke Boothby. No one blames the Tate for not having a collection that is entirely coherent and without any gaps – all collections are to some degree incoherent, and all have gaps. What does frustrate is that by this stubborn insistence on a policy of hanging by theme instead of chronology, the viewer is deprived of a deeper understanding of a period, while gaining nothing on any other level.

The pictures in the Clore Gallery are as wonderful as they have ever been. But goodness, it’s tiring to do the work the curators should have done for us.

• Romantics at Tate Britain is an ongoing display
• Read theartsdesk in New York: Extreme Blake