Is it a Turner? Is it a Rothko? With Turner’s Three Seascapes (see right) placed next to Mark Rothko’s Untitled in the Clore Galleries at Tate Britain, you can see why you might wonder.

There are obvious parallels: horizontal banding, preoccupation with light, abstract quality, and both artists’ interest in images with universal associations, with what might be called the ‘sublime’. In both, too, there’s a sense of looking at something raw and emergent. Rothko’s colours, blocks of fawn and brown, are different from the reds, blacks and greys of his more familiar works.

Turner’s colours, meanwhile, layered one on top of another, flow from a daunting battleship grey at the upper limit, through bands of sky, sea and sand, a few white wave tops leaping out of the narrow middle layer, light shimmering on the strand beneath. It is an extraordinary masterpiece, but it looks as if it could have been painted yesterday, or at least around the same time as Rothko’s. Yet the two paintings are nearly 150 years apart, Rothko’s acrylic painted in 1969 and J.M.W. Turner’s oil in 1827. Links between the artists have been made before. After Rothko visited a Turner exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966 he is said to have commented: “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me.” A few years later, needing a suitable home for his Seagram murals, Rothko donated nine to the Tate. The anglophile Rothko’s decision was influenced by the Tate’s having the renowned Turner Bequest in its collections.

Now six of Rothko’s Seagram murals, and a couple others, are on show alongside a selection of Turner’s oils and watercolours based on that MOMA exhibition.

There are far fewer here than at New York but you get a flavour of why Rothko was so impressed, the experimental watercolours A Pink Sky above a Grey Sea, and Storm Clouds: Sunset with a Pink Sky, revealing affinities between the painters. But does it work? While it was interesting and certainly a unique experience to see these two artists juxtaposed, inviting comparison, for me it didn’t quite work. I was left with a feeling of dissonance as I moved from, as the Tate says, the “immersive, meditative environment” of the so-called ‘Rothko Room’ to the brightness and excitement of the Turners. And they won. Turner here did Rothko no favours. The Seagram murals in Tate Modern, their usual setting, work brilliantly, but not here. To judge for yourself, you have until July 26. And it is free, courtesy of BP – part of Tate Britain’s BP British Art Displays – and doesn’t need any booking.

Theresa Thompson