Art - Ned Denny on a luminous painter who descended into chocolate-box blandness

There are more Cuyps in this country than anywhere else in Europe, which says much about our limitless appetite for pastoral whimsy. Back in the 19th century, when most of them were purchased, the benign glow of one of Aelbert Cuyp's mock-Italianate canvases was as essential a part of the English country pile as servants and starched linen. He was not the only member of the Dutch school to be collected, but Cuyp was nice, and therefore king. More than the oppressive twilight of a Jacob van Ruisdael or a Meindert Hobbema, with its upreared, predatory trees, a nobly radiant Cuyp both conferred status and acted as a kind of visual Prozac. Put bluntly, a Cuyp on the wall was a gold star of merit.

So far, so unsurprising. This is the received wisdom about Cuyp, trotted out whenever his name is mentioned in polite company. What I had not realised, and what the exhibition "Aelbert Cuyp" at the National Gallery makes very clear, is that his most celebrated work is sickly, sentimental and fit only for jigsaw puzzles. It is the sort of art that elderly Americans go into raptures over, full of olde worlde charm and clean-smocked peasants, but painted with a scrupulousness that kills it dead. Even that trademark Italian light is artificial, having been not felt on the nerves, but experienced vicariously through the work of better-travelled contemporaries. The thing that makes all this so blindingly obvious, however - and this is the show's second surprise - is the extraordinary beauty of his early paintings.

Luminous where his mature output is merely bright, these works fall roughly into two periods. The very earliest, dating from the first half of the 1640s, when Cuyp was barely into his twenties, portray not imagined Arcadias, but the unglamorous sprawl of his home soil. Marshes, sluggish rivers and only a few windswept trees to break the featureless flatness - it's hardly the stuff that dreams are made of, and yet, in Cuyp's little canvases, this meagre scenery shines like the promised land. The dirty, blurry gold of the trees reaches towards an eggshell-blue sky of such wonderful paleness that it is felt as much as seen, and this fundamental opposition somehow captures the essence of earthly life. Ordinariness is transfigured, but Cuyp never loses that crucial scent of the real that draws you in and holds you there. This is where the later works, escapist fantasies that seem to have relinquished their connection to the world, would come unstuck.

The onset of the next period, as distinct as the first from the "mature" Cuyp, is heralded by a change in the skies. The clouds in his first works are wispy and evanescent, the mind delighting in the barely perceptible shift between their pale forms and the blueness beyond. Now they become denser, weightier and altogether brushier, Cuyp allowing the restlessness of his painting hand to echo the corresponding restlessness in the sky. Such spontaneity was entirely out of keeping with the prevalent taste for clean outlines, an indiscretion that not only Cuyp but also Rembrandt suffered for. These, however, are the luminous, turbulent, weather-laden skies that Constable admired, and they have the seeds of the future in them. Cuyp's cows may sit stolidly at the bottom of the canvas, but the real drama is in the near-abstract expanse above them, in the endless complexities of the paint itself.

And then, unaccountably, it all starts to go wrong. In about 1650, when he turns 30, Cuyp stops being a painter of genius and becomes a talented illustrator. Did he lose his vision, or did he simply decide to give the good burghers of Dordrecht the eye-candy they wanted? That he died one of the city's richest men might well be telling. For whatever reason, the canvases completed between now and his 40th year (when he stopped painting altogether) lack something vital. While the skies in the early works seem to live and breathe, here they are entirely neutral spaces housing clouds that have the improbable solidity of rocks. But not even this faintly surrealistic touch can save a picture such as the National Gallery's own River Landscape (1660) - widely believed to be his crowning achievement - from chocolate-box blandness. Cuyp has become a Dutch version of Canaletto, producing technically accomplished yet formulaic scenes that feel no more real than stage sets. Most fatally of all, that imported light has obliterated the pale, elusive, nameless colours that haunt his finest work.

"Aelbert Cuyp" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 2885), until 12 May

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