{"id":93213,"date":"2025-08-24T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93213\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T09:11:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:11:15","slug":"turner-and-constable-were-rivals-but-did-they-need-each-other-to-thrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93213\/","title":{"rendered":"Turner and Constable were rivals \u2014 but did they need each other to thrive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a great scene in Mike Leigh\u2019s biopic Mr Turner that dramatises an episode at the Royal Academy in 1832. Seeing his contemporary John Constable putting the finishing touches to his nearby epic, the red-flecked The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, JMW Turner picks up a brush laden with red paint and smooshes a single blob into the centre of his own muted nautical scene, Helvoetsluys, to represent a buoy \u2014 and blows Constable\u2019s comparatively fussy picture out of the water.<\/p>\n

Constable\u2019s stunned response is said to have been: \u201cHe has been here and fired a gun.\u201d In the movie he storms out in a huff.<\/p>\n

Amy Concannon, the curator of the forthcoming exhibition Turner and Constable, at Tate Britain, which brings together the work of these two titans 250 years after their births, thinks it\u2019s possible that Constable\u2019s fabled flounce has been misconstrued. What if it were said more in admiration than in anguish? What if the explosion he referred to wasn\u2019t a shot across the bows, but the crack of a starting pistol? <\/p>\n

\u2022 The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for August 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMy take is that actually, in 1831, Constable had fired the first shot, because he\u2019d put his work by [that of] Turner, side by side [at the Royal Academy],\u201d she says. Constable had been on the hanging committee for the exhibition that year, so must have influenced the placement.<\/p>\n

It certainly caused a stir, with critics describing Turner\u2019s Caligula\u2019s Palace and Bridge as \u201call heat\u201d to the \u201chumidity\u201d of Constable\u2019s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (both are in the Tate show). Another called it a demonstration of \u201cTurner\u2019s fire and Constable\u2019s rain\u201d. The race was on. Now their work is side by side again in a landmark exhibition that shows the full span of both artists\u2019 careers. <\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent\u2019s Rock, Bristol<\/p>\n

SOTHEBY\u2019S<\/p>\n

Never-seen-before work<\/p>\n

Although it seems unimaginable, there will be works at Tate that visitors may not have seen before. Turner\u2019s The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent\u2019s Rock, Bristol was discovered just last year, after it was bought (as being painted by \u201ca follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson\u201d) at auction in Newbury, then sent for restoration by its new owner, whereupon Turner\u2019s signature was revealed. It was last on public display in 1793, when Turner exhibited it at the Royal Academy, aged 17 \u2014 it\u2019s now his earliest known oil painting. <\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, on loan from Cleveland Museum of Art, which has not been seen in a public exhibition in Britain since 1883. Neither the privately owned Ancient Italy \u2014 Ovid Banished from Rome, 1838, nor The Fifth Plague of Egypt, 1800, from Indianapolis Museum of Art, have been seen here since the Seventies. <\/p>\n

As for Constable, it\u2019s a coup to get his massive The White Horse, 1819, from the Frick Collection in New York, and his last 6ft sketch, Stoke-by-Nayland, c 1835\u20137, from the Art Institute of Chicago, both here for the first time in nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

John Constable by Ramsay Richard Reinagle c 1799\u2026<\/p>\n

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON<\/p>\n

\"J.M.W.<\/p>\n

\u2026 and J.M.W. Turner, Self-Portrait c 1799<\/p>\n

TATE<\/p>\n

Fire and water<\/p>\n

Perhaps a rivalry was inevitable. Born just a year apart, Turner in the noise and bustle of London\u2019s Covent Garden and Constable in the rural peace of East Bergholt, Suffolk, both were outsiders in the London art world. <\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s father, William, was a barber and purveyor of wigs, and the dominant parent, his mother, Mary, having been committed to an institution in his early childhood due to mental illness. <\/p>\n

\u2022 150 years later, a Turner painting revealed beneath cracked varnish<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cCovent Garden was the heart of commercial London,\u201d Concannon says. \u201cBut it was also near the Royal Academy, then at Somerset House. It isn\u2019t a big leap to think that some of Turner\u2019s dad\u2019s customers were involved with the Royal Academy. There were chances to converse with people who had made art their career.\u201d <\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s talent had shown from an early age \u2014 according to legend, he displayed his drawings in his father\u2019s shop window. \u201cTurner\u2019s dad was behind him all the way,\u201d Concannon says, explaining that is the big difference at this point in the two painters\u2019 lives. Constable was born a year later, in an \u201celegant house\u201d in the Suffolk countryside, to a wealthy merchant father whose primary concern was that he would be \u201ca gentleman\u201d. Constable\u2019s parents recognised the commercial potential of him becoming an artist, \u201cbut for them, the monetisation of that kind of talent was vulgar in itself, because you had to self-promote\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps<\/p>\n

TATE<\/p>\n

His parents did eventually get on board and allowed Constable to attend the Royal Academy, with a bursary from his father. \u201cSo they weren\u2019t entirely unsupportive, but he reached the Royal Academy seven years later than Turner had. He was 21, and if you think that Turner was 14, that\u2019s quite a big difference.\u201d By 27, Turner was a full Academician.<\/p>\n

No wonder Constable consciously presented himself as the opposite equal of his contemporary \u2014 he wrote in a letter: \u201cI feel deeply the honour of having found an original style & independent of him who would be Lord over all \u2014 I mean Turner.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n

This snarky sally is consistent with a man who liked to laugh but could be petty, such as when he referred to Turner\u2019s mammoth print project and landscape art manifesto, Liber Studiorum, started in 1806, as the \u201cliber stupidorum\u201d. Several years later, perhaps when he felt safe from comparison, Constable did one himself.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (\u2018Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817\u2019) by Constable<\/p>\n

TATE<\/p>\n

They differed in outlook too. Turner, whose father became his studio assistant as his fame and fortune grew, was a total artist \u2014 to the detriment of his family, which included Sarah Danby, a widow by whom he had two daughters, neither of whom he acknowledged. In his later years he lived with another widow, Sophia Booth, in Chelsea, but he reputedly once said: \u201cI hate married men \u2026 they never make any sacrifice to the arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort.\u201d<\/p>\n

Constable was precisely the kind of family man that Turner apparently despised \u2014 father of seven and sole parent to them after the death of his adored wife, Maria, in 1828, aged 41. Possibly understandably then, Constable never left England, whereas Turner was an intrepid traveller, visiting the Netherlands, France, Italy and Switzerland. <\/p>\n

A useful rivalry?<\/p>\n

But, Concannon says, there are plenty of similarities. \u201cThey were equally serious, equally ambitious,\u201d and \u201cbetween them, they revolutionised landscape painting\u201d. When they started, landscape was pretty far down the hierarchy at the Academy, which favoured history painting \u2014 only still life (flowers, ugh) was lower. <\/p>\n

Commercially, though, landscape was \u201cwhere the buzz was\u201d, Concannon says, describing it in the exhibition catalogue as \u201ca dynamic area of opportunity\u201d, with many possible formats and \u201can appeal to armchair tourists and souvenir seekers\u201d. <\/p>\n

Turner was the first to successfully marry the grandeur of history painting with landscape in a way that brought out a pathetic fallacy and enhanced the picture\u2019s narrative \u2014 his 1812 canvas Snow Storm, Hannibal Crossing the Alps will be in the show. A swirling image of the terrifying sublime is made instantly into a history painting by the inclusion of Hannibal\u2019s army as tiny figures in the distance (including a wee elephant).<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Ovid Banished From Rome<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

It\u2019s harder to see Constable\u2019s big idea, Concannon says, \u201cbut to make the kinds of pictures that he was making on such a grand scale, that was ballsy\u201d. An image such as Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour, 1811, is a \u201cprosaic, everyday scene that would mean something to the British public at that time \u2014 he was looking to appeal to people\u2019s understanding that nature drives Britain\u2019s prosperity and the natural order of society, man working with man in a hierarchy. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a Tory, he was quite adamant that people stay in their lane, but that they\u2019re doing so in this world that God has created.\u201d <\/p>\n

Both artists reflected their times, whether it\u2019s the clash of the new industrial era with nature in Turner\u2019s Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour\u2019s Mouth from 1842, or the threat posed by reform to the Anglican Church\u2019s political authority in Constable\u2019s ominous Salisbury Cathedral (he added the rainbow later, when it became clear it wasn\u2019t going to be as bad as all that). <\/p>\n

In a film made for the exhibition, the painter George Shaw (who favours Constable) calls him \u201ca quiet shouter \u2026 The darkness that\u2019s present in Constable\u2019s paintings is evidence of the changing face of British society. We have the Inclosure Act coming in, things aren\u2019t as harmonious as they seem in the cornfield. There\u2019s a lot of poverty, there\u2019s war on the horizon \u2014 these things are always in the corners.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Helvoetsluys: the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

They were technical innovators too, Constable in his scumbled application of paint, which after years of people griping about it, he stopped doing just as everyone else started picking up their palette knives (he was prone to moments of self-doubt, something Turner never suffered from); Turner pushed the medium of watercolour well beyond anything done previously.<\/p>\n

So their rivalry did neither of them any harm. And although they clearly weren\u2019t friends, there was a grudging respect between them. When Constable finally made it into the Academy in 1829, squeaking in by a single vote, Turner called on him to offer his congratulations, and they spent the evening together with another artist, George Jones, the party breaking up at 1am \u201cmutually pleased with one another\u201d, according to Constable. He later admitted to a friend: \u201cDid you ever see a Turner and not wish to possess it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Concannon won\u2019t be drawn on which artist she prefers. \u201cIt\u2019s both, and that\u2019s a real cop-out, isn\u2019t it?\u201d <\/p>\n

She pauses, battling with herself, then mutters that Turner\u2019s \u201cThe Blue Rigi is very difficult to beat\u201d. Constable might even agree. Grudgingly.<\/p>\n

Turner and Constable is at Tate Britain Nov 27-Apr 12; tate.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you prefer Turner\u2019s or Constable\u2019s depictions of British landscapes? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a great scene in Mike Leigh\u2019s biopic Mr Turner that dramatises an episode at the Royal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-93213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}