Whoever thought of creating an exhibition comparing the brilliance of JMW Turner with that of John Constable deserves a medal – maybe Tate Britain’s senior curator, Amy Concannon? Even if you are familiar with the work, seeing their paintings hung side by side reveals surprising similarities as well as differences.
The rivalry between them has not been cooked up as a marketing ploy; it was real. On show is a snippet from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner. It’s varnishing day for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1832. Turner saunters in with a brush load of crimson paint and dabs it onto a seascape hung near Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge.
Constable was mortified by the provocation; “Turner has been here, and fired a gun,” he exclaimed incredulously. His attempt to capture the pomp of the opening ceremony is rather stilted and, a few years later, Turner responded to his picture by painting an atmospheric view of the same stretch of river. Waterloo bridge is visible through a pall of smoke belching from the twin funnels of a steam ship. The pollution caused by the new steamers was a big issue at the time, but for Turner the smog was an absolute gift.
He relished the visual drama of smoke, fog and inclement weather. When the Houses of Parliament went up in flames in 1834, he seized the opportunity to paint the sky filled with billowing smoke and the river glowing red with fiery reflections (main picture). Above all, though, he loved light. He even managed to transform into lucid poetry the mundane subject of coal ships on the River Tyne (pictured above), by filling the centre of the canvas with a vast pool of moonlight. The coal barges, tall ships and men shovelling coal by flaming torch light are shunted into the margins by the full moon and its chilly glow.
Wild weather dominates his painting of Hannibal’s troops poleaxed by a violent snowstorm in the alps. When it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1812, Turner insisted that it be shown at eye level so viewers would experience the terrifying pull of the vortex at its heart. The raging blizzard occupies most of the canvas, while the stricken soldiers are relegated to the bottom few inches.
This push towards abstraction continued until paintings such as Light and Colour 1843 are an ecstatic celebration of the power of paint to conjure the sublime beauty of light and air. Ostensibly, the subject is Moses revealing the Ten Commandments, but the prophet is a tiny figure in the sky and the Jewish people are all but invisible – so much so, that a disgruntled critic described the swirling maelstrom of colour as a picture “of nothing and very like”.
Turner travelled Europe to record in his note books the awesome beauty of mountains (pictured above right: The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), 1804) and the dizzying power of the elements. And using these images to dramatise scenes from history and mythology, he sought to elevate landscape to the level of history painting. The ambition of this working class Londoner, then, was to rival the old masters by creating pictures of universal significance. And, of course, he succeeded.
Constable’s background and his goal could not have been more different. The son of a well to do Suffolk mill owner, his focus was on the familiar – the people and places he knew and loved. Instead of grandiose views from far flung places, his pictures are of the Dedham Valley where he grew up (pictured below left: John Constable, Dedham Vale, 1828) and of activities that related to the family business such as harvesting, boat building and the barges shipping grain along the River Stour and negotiating the locks.
To best capture the activity, he painted outdoors and his understanding of his subject matter shines through. Oils sketches such as Flailing Turnip Heads, East Bergholt 1812-15 give a detailed account of the task in hand. The man in the centre is beating the turnip heads with a flail to release the seeds, while the boys on the right are burning the unwanted stems and leaves. The picture is no rural idyll, but a factual record of back breaking effort.
Because he had to work fast to capture the dynamics of a scene, Constable developed a shorthand technique that was so radical it anticipates the expressive brush work of artists like Lovis Corinth nearly a hundred years later. The large canvases he painted for exhibition in the studio, though, inevitably lose the spontaneity of the sketches. Ambitious pictures like The White Horse, 1819 (pictured below) which he referred to as “six footers”, must have taken months to complete, yet they still feel amazingly fresh. Constable’s deep connection with and knowledge of his surroundings are crucial to this amazing sense of immediacy; so are the rapid flicks of colour which animate every inch of the canvas.
Then comes the sky. Since the weather governed every aspect of rural life, the skies were as important to him as light was to Turner. In sketch after sublime sketch, he records rapidly changing weather patterns – sunsets, rainstorms, rainbows, and clouds of every shape, size, colour and denomination. Transposed onto his more “finished” paintings, the luminous, scurrying or looming clouds make the sky as dynamic as the activity on the ground.
In many ways, the two artists were polar opposites, then. Turner looked for meaning in the universal and the sublime, while Constable found it on the ground, in the everyday world at his doorstep. Yet these titans of British art shared a passionate interest in the heavens and although there’s no mistaking a painting by Constable for one by Turner, you could easily mistake Constable’s Vivid Sunset 1820 or dramatic Rainstorm over the sea 1824-8 (pictured below) as one of his rival’s sketches.
I’m writing about the two artists separately, but the exhibition places them side by side – from formative years through to maturity. And the juxtaposition reveals numerous fascinating comparisons. Constable, for instance, was largely self taught and although Turner studied at the Royal Academy, he had to teach himself how to handle oils since it wasn’t on the curriculum! And I think this could be the key to their incredible achievements. The need to try things out and be inventive propelled each of them on, invigorating the quest to create a language that would encapsulate their very different world views.
This brilliantly researched exhibition is a mammoth achievement, and it offers a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But it is also somewhat overwhelming; so gird your loins, swallow a tin of spinach (a la Popeye) and get on down there. You’re in for a real treat.
- Turner and Constable, Rivals and Originals is at Tate Britain until 12 April 2026
- More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk
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