'Discover Constable and the Hay Wain' (National Gallery until February 2 2025): Confected Landscape

John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, National Gallery, London

The Hay Wain is much derided. Over familiar, over merchandised, it is one of those paintings which people have long stopped looking at, yet which has never quite achieved untouchable 'national treasure' status, like, say, The Fighting Temeraire. Recently it has gained new exposure in parody and satire - Peter Kennard's anti-nuclear version - but it has also become embattled as part of the 'contested landscape' debate. It is either brave, or perverse, of the National Gallery to devote one of their brilliant 'Discover' exhibitions to it. Hats off because it is a gem of a show, which should make everyone look and think again about not only this painting, but John Constable's work in general. Next year we will be approaching the 250th anniversary of his birth, to be celebrated with a heavyweight Tate Britain showdown between Constable himself and JMW Turner. This is a good way to kick things off.

The Hay Wain's big problem is that everything about it seems conservative and old-fashioned to twenty-first century eyes. It is not just the rural setting, the horse and cart, the picturesque cottage; it is the manner of execution which seems, to us, so 'finished'. In fact, Constable's real difficulty is that he falls between two stools. His work, as a telling contemporary quote on the wall at the start of the show explains, was actually considered too loose, too sketchy and too difficult to look at. The curators give us a fine wall of nineteenth century landscapes, including examples by John Linnell and Francis Danby, which prove the same point. And up close, in person, the dashes of white, the imprecision, the textured dottiness of Constable's work become impossible to ignore. Subconsciously, they are always there, affecting the way we view it.  The cosy artificiality of earlier landscapes - staged groups of figures, light and shade balanced compositions, faded distance - register as paintings and judged accordingly. Constable is assessed against nature and naturalism. Our brains link his visible hand forward to Impressionism and find him wanting, but judged against what was known and seen in the 1820s his radical technique is blatantly obvious.

The show also contextualises the Hay Wain within Constable's own work - other examples of his big, finished set pieces - The Cornfield, Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds - and preparatory sketches. There are the inevitable cloud studies, despite the fact that his interest in the sky really post-dates the Hay Wain. More interestingly, we can follow the development of the painting itself from early representations of Willy Lott's cottage through to the full scale sketch which acted as a plan - but not an identical one - for the finished work. This is landscape which is carefully orchestrated, certainly confected if not contested, in an attempt to produce something which was both personally and artistically meaningful, and yet fell within the bounds of academic acceptability. Again, the exhibition provides ample contemporary evidence that Constable was pushing the boundaries - along with the galling truth that it was the French who first saw the aesthetic value of this most English of landscapes. 

There are those who will think the National Gallery have skirted round the issue of Constable's idealisations and omissions. The show contains contemporary cartoons and one of Stubb's harvesting scenes where the sturdy labourers are presented as fine specimens in a way reminiscent of his images of race horses, but the curators avoid jumping on the 'art as social history' bandwagon. There are no starving peasants, no rampant enclosure, no radical unrest, in Constable's work but should we really expect there to be? He is both painting his own, necessarily limited, experience as a member of a land-owning family, and constructing finished canvases from memory, generating an inbuilt nostalgia which was never going to be realist reportage. Historians have been deconstructing Constable's representations of rural life ever since John Barrell's brilliant 1980 Dark Side of Landscape  - there's plenty there if you want to look for it, but please don't throw him under a bus for not being Courbet.

The National Gallery's 'Discover' exhibitions rarely disappoint, but the Hay Wain show is particularly impressive. Giving the most banally familiar of paintings space and context, quite literally makes you see it with fresh eyes. Constable is always the dull, worthy counterpoint to the Turner's bravura excitement. But underestimate him at your peril. His paint fizzes with life, dense and dazzling in equal measures. You feel the glow of the sunlight and become immersed in the barely there details. Soak it up. Enjoy.

'Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers' (National Gallery Until January 19 2025): Art in the Raw

Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This Van Gogh exhibition had to do some pretty heavy lifting. My initial reaction had been cynical - a good money spinner to help pay for the Sainsbury Wing renovation. The National Gallery might never have held an exhibition dedicated to arguably the world's most famous artist, but everywhere else has. What more is there to be said? Having queued outside in the rain and faced with a wall of bodies and the ubiquitous camera phone junkies between me and every painting, I was pretty determined to not like this. And yet, one look across a crowded room....

Van Gogh is always better in the flesh. His work sings, his colours glow, his brushwork comes alive so that the canvases dance off the walls and into your heart. This is the great irony - an artist known for his traumatic life and death story is actually the producer of some of the most joyous, life-enhancing paintings in the history of art. And the National Gallery curators have pulled off the remarkable feat of reminding you of that. By ignoring the biography and almost forcing their visitors to just look, they have given Van Gogh new life. I took their aims to heart, ignoring the accompanying booklet which does flesh out the backstory and just soaking up the paintings and drawings on the walls. Sixty one works, which seemed to end far too quickly, which banished dreary December and pre-Christmas anxiety and belied all the cliches about self-mutilation and mental instability, about impossible friendships and unsold artworks. 

The curator's premise, laid out in the opening display, of Lieutenant Milliet (The Lover), Eugene Bloch (The Poet) and The Poet's Garden, is a stretch, but a clever, convincing one. More importantly, it sets the mood, because for all that he painted the world and the people around him, Van Gogh was a dreamer, a romantic, whose representation of life was filtered through his emotional response. He has been straight-jacketed into the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist narrative but he was constrained by Paris, and rubbed up fractiously against Gauguin - there seems a far greater affinity in his work with those early twentieth century Expressionists who found love, life and community in villages like Murnau. That opening room creates a mood which successfully permeates the whole show: scrubby town parks become exotic and paradisiacal, everyday figures become iconic folk heroes.

It is not that Van Gogh is perfect. You see his weaknesses on repeat: he struggled to work out what to do with the foreground often creating canvases of two awkward halves; he was obsessed with unnecessary figures, men with splayed legs and women with angled parasols; his Japonism was often heavy-handed. He was not afraid to acknowledge his influences, rather he foregrounded them. This exhibition might only cover the period 1888-90 - the development from Dutch grunginess through anxious Impressionism is not included - but you see his homage to Jean Francois Millet, the majestic Sower, haloed by the sun who strides across a landscape sliced in two by that angled, Gauguinesque tree; you see him deliberately reference Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe; you see him working through the choice of flattened, blocked colour or hatched impasto. You see too, through much less familiar drawings, how much of a craftsman he was, walking miles to sketch, returning to the same images, experimenting with new materials. It is hard not to look at Van Gogh's drawings and feel the lack of colour but Weeping Tree, with the characteristic reed pen softened by black chalk, is boldly other-worldly, a mixture of Art Nouveau patterning and Mondrian's early experimentation. It doesn't weep so much as centre the whole landscape, the trunk like a spinal cortex connecting the canopy with the grasses.

Vincent Van Gogh, Weeping Tree, 1889, Art Institute of Chicago

The last room feels slightly anticlimactic  - perhaps inevitable after the starriness of all those celebrities - the chair, the bedroom, the sunflowers, the man himself. Both the last theme (variations) and the examples feel forced - what can we do now - and there is the inevitable sense that the end isn't the end, not quite. There are exceptions: Tree Trunks in the Grass with its two strong columns of bark reduced to patchwork patterns against a fluff of greenery and almost three dimensional white flowers. As with so many of the canvases, there is no horizon, the world reduced to this tiny corner, teeming with life. Sometimes you don't need the big picture; sometimes it doesn't help to know the context, biography, the future. Van Gogh brings you into the moment with such a raw connection that you can feel the hand holding the brush at your shoulder. No other artist manages to collapse time so effectively. There is only the here and now.

'Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504' (Royal Academy until February 16 2025)

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Male Nude seen from Behind, c. 1504-6, Casa Buonarroti, Florence

I'm sure the Royal Academy didn't intend their 1504 exhibition to coincide with the new BBC drama doc in which Charles Dance gently hams up his prosthetic broken nose as the old Michelangelo looking back on a great rivalry with Leonardo and Raphael. Having resorted to shouting at the TV screen in frustration at its inaccuracies and missed opportunities, I was looking forward to some serious curation. But RA shows are often frustrating half-successes. Three rooms, one of which is entirely devoted to a reverential display of the Burlington House Cartoon, was never really going to be enough. Like the languid historical recreations and repetitive talking heads of the screen version, this show constantly threatened to teeter over into a triumph of style over substance.

It all started promisingly with the Taddei Tondo, crisply lit and well explained. The image of the Pitti roundel alongside (and they were never going to get the original), Piero di Cosimo's iteration of a tondo and Raphael's Bridgewater Madonna - it all felt satisfying focused. But at the same time, there seemed to be so much more to investigate. The National Gallery's Raphael show of a couple of years ago, for instance, had a great exploration of how he developed his compositions to suit a roundel form. Exactly what Michelangelo was doing between is two relief attempts, yet ignored here. Equally, the similarity in pose between the Michelangelo's Christ and Leonardo's cartoon version, was pointed up, but it required strained vision across a crowded gallery to really appreciate it. 

What you could not fault was the judicious choice of drawings which balanced a focus on process with a desire to just bask in the sheer beauty which these artists could conjure up on paper. A few examples here (some from the royal collection) had more impact than roomfuls at the Kings Picture Gallery. Michelangelo's stretching male nude from the Casa Buonarroti seems to encapsulate his whole artistic practise with its tense striving. Raphael's back view of David was similarly revelatory, yet seemed marooned on a wall: the curators had thought to include an image of Michelangelo's sculpture, despite its ubiquitous fame, but it was not displayed alongside the drawing.

Similarly, the Leonardo cartoon, was an underused resource. It is familiar to most London gallery-goers and so surely needs to justify its inclusion, despite the RA's new research which has suggested, for the first time, the purpose of the drawing. From memory, I believe the National Gallery hung it lower: certainly here it felt slightly diminished here, a little high and difficult to view without reflected light. It seemed significant that despite a bench in front of it, and a fairly busy exhibition, no one was really lingering as perhaps the curators intended. In a show whose dark walls and necessarily subdued lighting generates a sense of hushed awe, this feels too much as if we are expected to worship at the altar of Leonardo's genius.

The last room was devoted to the 'battle of the Battles', a bizarre non-event which has always captured more attention that it probably deserves. You can only ever get so far with 'what ifs' and one whole wall devoted to an outline silhouette of Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina seemed particularly indulgent. That said, the exhibition actually did a very good job of conjuring up both the essence and the imagined reality of the two compositions: Leonardo's swirling, character-driven emotion which seemed strangely old-fashioned with its contorted horses and precisely rendered armour, and Michelangelo's nude-fest that increasingly seemed like a dry run for the Last Judgment. Again, the drawings were the stars, so why they were not on the wall is a mystery.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Taddei Tondo, c.1504-5, Royal Academy, London

Can you really go wrong with an exhibition entitled Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504? It will get people through the doors with the names of probably the greatest triumvirate in the whole of art history. It brings with it a compelling in-built narrative of competition and rivalry. But it is also perhaps too easy to be complacent: you already have the only Michelangelo sculpture in the country, you know the National Gallery might be quite glad to get the Burlington Cartoon off its hands during the Sainsbury Wing revamp.  Personally, I think the Royal Academy can do better. A three room exhibition needs to be tightly curated, with every choice justified and made to work. Ultimately, 1504 gets by on the beauty of the Renaissance drawings it displays. Is that enough?