A new exhibition will claim JMW Turner was a supremely competitive artist who regularly tried to trump the Old Masters.

The show at Tate Britain this autumn will argue that Turner was unique in the scale of his bid to out-do his predecessors. It will display dozens of his masterpieces with rival works by the likes of Canaletto and Rubens to show how he routinely produced versions that were bigger and more dramatic.

David Solkin, co-curator, said: "Every artist learns from artists who come before. But nobody else does it with so many. This was the first time London had been flooded with Old Masters, after the French Revolution, and major exhibitions. That's a challenge for British painters and it overwhelms a lot of them. But Turner thinks, 'I can do what they did even better.'"

Turner's The Deluge will be displayed next to Nicolas Poussin's Winter - The Deluge, which he criticised for "defective" lines. His version was larger and designed to make the Poussin look static. When commissioned to produce a companion piece to A Rising Gale by Willem Van de Velde, Turner reversed the composition and made it larger to heighten the drama.

Turner and the Masters will run from 23 September to 31 January 2010 with admission charge.

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