It’s the great British paint-off. Two of our country’s most illustrious landscapists, Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable, were born within about a year of one another: Turner in 1775, Constable in 1776. Now, to celebrate their shared 250th anniversary, Tate Britain in London stages a show which, assembling 170 pieces (paintings, works on paper and a handful of objects), sets the pair head-to-head.
Impulsive genius is pitted against measured dedication. The sublime meets the humble; the bombastic visionary meets the quiet bucolic; a poetic imagination contrasts with a dogged pursuit of truth. This show looks set to stand as a waypoint in any future discussions of our landscape tradition. If you can’t get to see it, invest in the accompanying catalogue. It costs about the same as the entrance ticket.
Of course, many of the most famous paintings that now go on show can be admired free of charge in our national collections. Here, for example, is Turner’s 1812 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps: a maelstrom of an image in which a historical subject, previously considered the very grandest of artistic genres, is swallowed up whole by the surrounding landscape. The Carthaginian general atop his clambering pachyderm is reduced to a speck amid an elemental storm.
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Equally evocative — though utterly different — is Constable’s 1825 The Leaping Horse. In this picture of a barge-horse lurching over a barrier, the Suffolk-born son of a mill owner distils his deep understanding that he could paint his “own places best”. You can all but feel the spring breezes that ruffle the poplar leaves; smell the dampness of mallows and rushes and moss.
Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals is not just a show of golden greats. You won’t find The Hay Wain or Rain, Steam and Speed. You can’t thrill to the elegiac glory of The Fighting Temeraire or delight in the heat of that high-summer Cornfield. You must tack on a trip to the Clore wing of Tate Britain or the National Gallery for those. On the flip side, however, there are pictures you will seldom if ever have seen before.
Among the highlights is Constable’s 1819 The White Horse, on rare loan from the Frick in New York: a “placid representation of a serene, grey morning, summer,” as Constable described it. Displayed alongside a selection of other scaled-up “six footers”, it is shown at its best, hung so low that the viewer, stepping towards it, is all but immersed.
The White Horse, by John Constable
THE FRICK COLLECTION, NEW YORK. PHOTO: JOSEPH COSCIA JR
But it had none of Turner’s poetry, decided one contemporary critic: the sort that is evidenced from this artist’s earliest beginnings as his The Rising Squall, discovered only last year and now going on show for the first time since it made its Royal Academy debut in 1793.
• Turner and Constable were rivals — but did they need each other to thrive?
Six years ago the RA pulled off a coup. It reunited the two pictures that, in 1832, epitomised a public rivalry between Turner and Constable. Story has it that when Turner saw his cool seascape Helvoetsluys hung beside Constable’s scarlet-flecked The Opening of Waterloo Bridge he was piqued by the prospect of being upstaged and so, in a retaliatory move, added a large blob of red to his canvas (a clip from the 2014 film Mr Turner dramatises the moment), later finessing it to appear like a buoy. “He has been here and fired a gun,” the dismayed Constable famously declared.
Turner’s Dutch seascape does not come on loan this time from Tokyo. Instead we are invited to consider an even earlier comparison, to look through the eyes of the critics who, casting the pair as opposing natural forces, compared the “heat” of Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge to the humidity of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. “Fire and water” meet.
Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, by Turner
TATE
Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, by Constable
TATE
The story of this juxtaposition will be far less familiar. But the lack of cliché is a strength of a show that takes us on a chronological trip through two artistic careers. It begins with a pair of young men (you first meet them through their portraits and a brief, eye-grabbing, introduction to their paintings) on a tour of the Lakes and, after richly illustrated comparisons of their differing obsessions, styles and techniques, ends with two masters, both preoccupied with capturing the blaze, sparkle and flicker of light. The exhibition challenges the way in which they have often been typecast.
• Turner v Constable: who really won the great painterly duel?
Turner was not necessarily the maverick. Constable was far from mundane. In his efforts to capture his sense of the freshness of nature, his brushwork was at first bolder and more vigorous than that of his peer who, as a younger man, stuck safely to polished topographies. Compare, as the finale of this show does so eloquently, their late works and, albeit with radically different styles — what could contrast more strongly than Turner’s deliquescent c1845 Norham Castle and Constable’s On The River Stour from around the same period — they both verge on the abstract. Nor was Turner, with his depictions of steam tugs and trains, necessarily the novel one and Constable the nostalgic. The latter’s canals were an industrial innovation; his cloudscapes were explorations of advances in meteorological science.
Cloud Study, by Constable
ABBOT HALL, KENDAL (LAKELAND ARTS TRUST)
Who is better? Make time for a trip to the café to argue it over. But artists cannot, nor should not, be judged like TV show contestants; their works compared like puddings or soufflés or cakes. You may have a personal preference. But what this show makes clear is that, despite their differing characters and career trajectories, they were both highly ambitious, stubbornly dedicated and bravely radical. Between them they revolutionised painting in equal measure. The real winner in this show is our landscape tradition itself.
★★★★★
Tate Britain, London, Nov 27 to Apr 12, tate.org.uk
Times event
Join us on January 20 for a private view of this exhibition. The evening will begin with complimentary drinks on arrival, followed by a talk by exhibition curator Amy Concannon, senior curator, Historic British Art, and the opportunity to experience the exhibition after-hours. Book tickets here.