Visual art - A stunning triple bill at Tate Britain has Richard Cork marvelling at the mastery of Claude Monet

John Ruskin may have been Turner's most ardent supporter, but the cantankerous critic was often woefully wrong about his fav- ourite artist. Soon after Turner's small painting Moonlight: a study at Millbank was bequeathed to the nation, Ruskin deplored its "feeble execution, and total absence of apparent choice of arrangement in the forms of boats and buildings". Now, however, this potent little panel is the very first exhibit in a delectable show at Tate Britain, not far from the riverside setting itself.

Plenty of moonlight scenes had been painted by previous artists, but Turner, at only 22, pared the scene down to its essence. Apart from the clarity and brilliance of the moon's orb, everything is reduced to mysterious, elemental silhouettes. He succeeded in looking at his native city as if for the very first time. As his career developed, so Turner's brush marks grew more free, along with his awareness of London's volatile weather and growing pollution. In a large panorama of London from Greenwich Park, he makes sure that Wren's riverside hospital is depicted with tightness and architectural accuracy, but the city beyond is handled more loosely to convey the wind-blown thickness of chimney smoke and gathering clouds. He called it a "murky veil", and was never afraid to paint the Thames shrouded in the pall of mists, fogs and encroaching dusk.

By concentrating on Turner's views of the Thames, the show makes us realise how indebted Whistler and Monet were to him. When Whistler moved from Paris to London in 1859, he set about drawing and painting the city's river - first down at Wapping, but then at Battersea. Staring through riverside windows at the same view Turner had studied, he refused to be taken aback by the stench of the notoriously smelly London Gas Light Company. Nor did he mind the smokestacks of the Morgan Crucible Company, which had been fined for belching out far too much filth. He gave his early Battersea paintings titles as poetic as Brown and Silver. Nothing was too polluted for Whistler, who revelled in the grime and mistiness of these indistinct views.

Monet, who first came over to London in 1870, probably contacted Whistler and saw these audacious paintings. He looked at Turner's bequest in the National Gallery, and the initial outcome was a small painting called The Thames below Westminster. Here, the new parliament buildings are reduced to pale, blue-grey spectres in the foggy atmosphere. For Monet, it was the beginning of a protracted infatuation with London and its mesmeric, ever-changing river.

During the 1870s, however, Whistler went further than his French ally. In an astounding sequence of Thames nocturnes, he purged his paintings of everything save the limpid fundamentals. The earliest canvas looks across from Batter-sea to Chelsea. But nothing, not even the squat tower of Chelsea Old Church, can be identified with confidence. We are left with horizontal sweeps of sky, city and water, interrupted only by reflections, a solitary barge and an equally isolated figure who seems transfixed by the view. The work anticipates the most radical forms of 20th-century abstraction, even if Whistler's starting point remained rooted in his own avid scrutiny of the world.

Looking at these extraordinary images, we feel that Whistler was preoccupied above all with mortality. Transience became a painfully understandable obsession when, in 1896, he moved into a room in the luxurious new Savoy Hotel. While his wife Beatrice lay dying of cancer on a bed near the window, Whistler produced a series of Thames etchings. They served as a vital precedent for Monet's great sequences of paintings when he stayed at the same hotel. The product of three visits, between 1899 and 1903, these canvases are the sublime climax of the exhibition.

With tireless resolve, Monet painted Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from every conceivable position. The slightest shift in vantage, or change in the light, was enough to make him embark on another version of the same subject. Monet's reliance on silhouetted forms reminds us of Whistler's nocturnes or even Turner's moonlit Millbank. But Monet pursued the blood-red sun rather than the blanched moon, favouring the strangely crepuscular effects created by noxious London smogs during the day. He braved the lethal air so that its most tantalising and toxic veils could lend his paintings their fugitive yet limitless fascination.

Monet triumphs again in the final room, filled with paintings, watercolours and prints of Venice by all three artists. The city's magnificence did not tempt Whistler to let go of his near-monochrome austerity. Even in Grand Canal, he is ethereal and wedded to the moonlight. But Turner, only a decade before his death, unleashed the fiery force of sunset bursting on the lagoon. As for Monet, he achieved full-blown rapture in his climactic San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. The entire scene seems to catch fire, engulfing everything apart from the church and its tower's insistent reflection in the blazing water.

When Monet explored Venice for the first time, he wrote: "What marvellous things." The same awed words could be applied to his own images, as well as the finest work by the other painters in this resplendent and revelatory survey.

"Turner, Whistler, Monet" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8000) until 15 May

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