{"id":155772,"date":"2025-11-27T14:13:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T14:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/155772\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T14:13:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T14:13:12","slug":"turner-and-constable-face-off-exhilaratingly-at-tate-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/155772\/","title":{"rendered":"Turner and Constable face off exhilaratingly at Tate Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Born a year apart, 250 years ago, a Covent Garden barber\u2019s only son and a Suffolk mill owner\u2019s fourth child grew up to become the greatest artists England ever produced.<\/p>\n

Nothing in their families in 1775-76 presaged such a thing. But amid convulsions shaking the nation in the next half century \u2014 Napoleonic wars, industrial revolution, land reforms, expanding empire \u2014 two self-made men transformed painting and defined ideas of Englishness which are still potent today.<\/p>\n

Tate Britain\u2019s Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals tells that exhilarating story. It celebrates landscape as their new area of opportunity, obsession and battleground, explores their stunningly different approaches, and dramatises how competition stimulated daring and experiment.<\/p>\n

Although most works are from British collections, dazzling American loans lift the show above the familiar. JMW Turner imports include magnificent examples of the artist converging ancient and modern time and nature\u2019s elemental power. On loan from Washington\u2019s National Gallery of Art, \u201cKeelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight\u201d is an industrial nocturne charged with mystery in the double lustre of orange firelight and iridescent moon illuminating the Tyne, a composition based on Claude\u2019s classical \u201cA Seaport\u201d. Meanwhile Yale Center for British Art\u2019s \u201cStaffa, Fingal\u2019s Cave\u201d depicts a geological wonder reached by a brand new steamer.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018The White Horse\u2019 (1819) by John Constable \u00a9 The Frick Collection, New York<\/p>\n

For John Constable, the sequence of glorious, vital \u201csix-footers\u201d, portraying barges and flickering reflections on the River Stour, unfolds thanks to the Frick\u2019s pitch-perfect, serene \u201cThe White Horse\u201d, and the airy \u201cView on the Stour near Dedham\u201d, on loan from California\u2019s Huntington Library \u2014 light cumulus clouds, swallows skimming water, exquisitely delineated reeds, lilies. They join the turbulent, nervously painted \u201cThe Leaping Horse\u201d, pigment slapped on with a palette knife, to show how the six-footers, begun early in Constable\u2019s ecstatic marriage, changing tone when his wife Maria became deathly ill, brought autobiographical expressiveness to landscape. \u201cPainting is but another word for feeling\u201d, Constable said.<\/p>\n

All this is heralded in the opening pair of lovely, youthful scenes of towers and winding waterways. Constable\u2019s day-bright silvery trees frame the Stour meandering to the village and church in \u201cDedham Vale\u201d (1802). Turner\u2019s hillside rivulet bubbles down from a ruined medieval keep in \u201cDolbadarn Castle\u201d (1800); by a stream, soldiers and an imprisoned Welsh prince glow in the twilight.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Vale of Dedham\u2019 (1828) by Constable \u00a9 National Galleries of Scotland<\/p>\n

So the rivals set out their stall: fresh, sparkling renderings of everyday scenes, innovative in their large scale, and sublime romantic landscapes incorporating history and myth. In alternating galleries, Tate highlights aspects of each career \u2014 Constable\u2019s cloudscapes, Turner\u2019s vertiginous watercolours of glaciers and mountains \u2014 then brings the artists head-to-head.<\/p>\n

Precocious Turner quickly scintillated. Elected Royal Academician at 26, he had already won admiration in his teens; a rarity, \u201cThe Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent\u2019s Rock, Bristol\u201d (1792) \u2014 recently discovered, it sold for \u00a31.9mn in July \u2014 depicts storm-tossed vessels on the river Avon in scumbles of half-opaque colour. Life-long, Turner would manipulate such layers of thin, wet glazes, eventually blending forms into glistening hazy effects as in, 50 years later, the translucent veils through which the morning star is mirrored in Lake Lucerne in \u201cThe Blue Rigi\u201d (1842).<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Shade and Darkness \u2014 the Evening of the Deluge\u2019 (1843) by Turner \u00a9 Tate<\/p>\n

\u201cAtmosphere is my style, indistinctness my fault,\u201d Turner declared. Dissolving the world into light, steam, fog, he made landscape epic. Human ambition is vanquished by nature \u2014 tiny silhouetted figures in a blizzard \u2014 in \u201cSnow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps\u201d. The spinning vortex \u201cShade and Darkness \u2014 the Evening of the Deluge\u201d insists on man\u2019s cosmic insignificance. Sun blazes temples and triumphal arches into blurs, closing a golden age, in \u201cAncient Italy: Ovid Banished from Rome\u201d. As natural forces overpower man, these imperious paintings overwhelm the viewer.<\/p>\n

Constable, whose subject was lived reality not enchanted visions, found his way more slowly; he sold only 20 paintings in England in his lifetime, and was 52 when elected to the Royal Academy. While Turner the restless entrepreneur traversed Europe, tapping the burgeoning tourist market, Constable doggedly homed in on his childhood terrain and its pastoral rhythms.<\/p>\n

\"AnConstable\u2019s \u2018Rainstorm over the Sea\u2019 (c1824-1828) \u00a9 Royal Academy of Art<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Valley of the Stour at Sunset\u201d, capturing shifting light in sweeping banks of pastel, is dated October 31 1812, denoting the end of harvest-time. Painted outdoors, \u201cFlatford Mill\u201d surveys the Stour flowing through his father\u2019s land one summer day in 1816, trees in full leaf, wind rustling, a tow-horse waiting on the gravel path where Constable inscribes his signature, like a boy carving his name in the earth with a stick. \u201cThe sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotting planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter,\u201d Constable said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere isn\u2019t a Turner that doesn\u2019t somehow fly and there isn\u2019t a Constable that doesn\u2019t burrow,\u201d Frank Auerbach suggested. Even when Constable\u2019s spires pierce the sky, as in \u201cSalisbury Cathedral\u201d, you sense, as Auerbach says, that \u201che seems to have walked every path\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Everything has been worked for and made personal\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Constable\u2019s own body is somehow inside the landscapes\u201d.<\/p>\n

The ultimate face-off, Turner\u2019s \u201cFighting Temeraire\u201d, voted the nation\u2019s favourite painting in a 2005 BBC poll, versus Constable\u2019s \u201cThe Hay Wain\u201d, which came second, remains at the National Gallery. But Tate reprises a celebrated 1831 confrontation, between Constable\u2019s febrile \u201cSalisbury Cathedral\u201d \u2014 quivering trees, raindrops glinting on brambles, glassy river, pellucid rainbow \u2014 and Turner\u2019s invented sunset vista \u201cCaligula\u2019s Palace and Bridge\u201d. Critics at the time marvelled at \u201cTurner\u2019s fire and Constable\u2019s rain\u201d, declared that Constable was \u201call truth\u201d and Turner \u201call poetry\u201d, though the paintings also share much: majestic composition, exaltation of nature, nostalgic sentiment.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018The Valley of the Stour at Sunset\u2019 (1812) by Constable <\/p>\n

So who wins? I enjoyed changing my mind. Midway, when the six-footers meet Turner\u2019s clotted historical fantasies such as \u201cThe Fifth Plague of Egypt\u201d, Constable\u2019s breezy energetic naturalism triumphs, and his truth-to-nature often makes Turner\u2019s theatricality \u2014 \u201cJuliet and her Nurse\u201d in a flaming Venice, for example \u2014 look overwrought, even fake.<\/p>\n

But Constable never fully recovered his verve after Maria\u2019s death, and Turner had the luck to live longer. Although the broken surfaces and fabulous sprinkled white glittery light in Constable\u2019s last works \u2014 Washington\u2019s Phillips Collection\u2019s \u201cOn the River Stour\u201d, the Art Institute of Chicago\u2019s \u201cStoke-by-Nayland\u201d, both finished 1837, the year he died \u2014 demonstrate radical freedom, they don\u2019t compare to the miracle of late Turner taking painting to the brink of modern abstraction.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018St Benedetto, Looking towards Fusina\u2019 (1843) by Turner \u00a9 Tate<\/p>\n

Revisiting a 1798 sketch, \u201cNorham Castle: Sunrise\u201d (1845) is a ghostly oil painting whose smudgy blue building and ochre shores melt in the sun\u2019s rays into pools of opalescent colour, as cows, spectral outlines, arrive for their morning drink. In the Venetian sunset \u201cSt Benedetto, Looking towards Fusina\u201d (1843), waterside buildings tremble like a mirage under coruscating white-yellow pigment; funereal black gondolas float by. Paint, no longer strictly descriptive, conveys themes of lost time, fugitive memory, falling empires. \u201cWithout one single accurate detail,\u201d Ruskin said, this painting by Turner was \u201cthe likest thing to what it is meant for . . . of all that I have ever seen.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

To April 12 2026, tate.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

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