Rivals of the Landscape

J. M. W. Turner and John Constable were born fourteen months apart, Turner in April 1775, Constable in June 1776, and the exhibition “Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals” at Tate Britain celebrates their 250th birthdays. A friend who was wondering whether to go finally said, “I think I’ll give it a miss—I sort of feel I’ve seen them.” Many of us feel the same. To people growing up in Britain, Turner and Constable seemed to be everywhere: in history texts and guidebooks, on greeting cards, jigsaw puzzles, and biscuit tins, on the walls of pubs and dentists’ waiting rooms. We thought we knew them. But how wrong we were. Far from being familiar or reverential, the Tate show, curated by Amy Concannon, is a revelation. This is partly due to the cumulative power of the works. Dark streams of paint are hurled as rainstorms over mountains, whirling vortices pull the viewer in, sunsets blaze and rainbows arch, so that one almost feels the physical force of Constable’s scumbling brushwork and Turner’s swaths of color. At the same time a sense of intimacy comes from small things clustered among the large: Constable’s sketches of the Cumbrian Mountains, Turner’s rapid notations, Constable’s paint box and sketching chair, Turner’s spectacles and brushes.

As Concannon notes in the exhibition catalog, “Art history loves a rivalry: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse.” The Tate embraces the contrasts. It is typical of the show’s confidence that it devotes an entire room to the famous artistic clash of 1831, which began when Constable, a member of the hanging committee for the annual Royal Academy exhibition, moved one of a pair of Turner paintings, The Vision of Medea and Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, so that his own Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows hung between them. This could have been just to fix problems in hanging, or even a gesture of kindness to dilute the brilliant chrome yellow for which Turner was so derided. But whatever the reason, it looked like a blatant declaration of competition. Both Caligula’s Palace and Salisbury Cathedral referenced history at a time of contemporary unease: Turner mocking imperial hubris, Constable’s Gothic cathedral beneath stormy skies hinting at the Anglican Church “under a cloud” (after the exhibition he added the rainbow, a blink of optimism). Turner’s shimmering gold next to Constable’s cool blues and greens was jolting. Critics scented battle, as the Englishman’s Magazine put it, between “Turner’s fire and Constable’s rain.”

A year later, according to Constable’s friend Charles Robert Leslie (the only source), Turner gave the gossips even more material. Before the opening of the 1832 exhibition, the artists found that their paintings once again hung side by side. On “Varnishing Day” (when artists traditionally came in to finish and varnish their paintings), watching Constable dabbing final touches of vermilion on The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, Turner silently added a single dot of red “somewhat bigger than a shilling” to the pale harbor scene of his Helvoetsluys. A day later he changed it to a buoy, but he left it long enough for it to seem a deliberate parody of Constable’s fussy scarlet touches. Recent scholars have suggested that, rather than artistic aggression, this was simply the playful teasing typical of Academy banter, even a sign of comradeship. Maybe, but it still stung. In a joking touch, the Tate showed a clip from Mike Leigh’s film Mr. Turner (2014) in which the lugubrious Timothy Spall as Turner quotes Constable’s reported words: “He has been here and fired a gun.” Paintbrushes at dawn.

Success came more quickly to Turner, who flew from the start. Concannon and Nicola Moorby in her spirited and absorbing joint biography, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape, both explain this through background and topography. Turner grew up above his father’s barbershop in Covent Garden, a hub of artists’ studios and auction rooms where, Moorby says, all things were for sale: “food, alcohol, coffee, flowers, clothes, jewellery, entertainment and, not least, sex.” While his mother’s mental health problems cast a shadow, Turner had the fervent support of his father, who hung his drawings in the shop window, found him tuition money, and later acted as his assistant. With the backing of “Old Dad,” he entered the Royal Academy schools in 1789 at fourteen, trained with the topographical draftsman Thomas Malton, and copied watercolors among the group of young artists fostered by the collector Thomas Monro. At the Academy he showed his first watercolor in 1790 and his first oil in 1796. Almost at once he began making sketching tours and winning influential clients.

Constable’s youth at his family home in East Bergholt in rural Suffolk was spent far from the capital’s commercial and artistic networks. His father, a wealthy grain merchant who owned mills at nearby Flatford and Dedham and a fleet of barges on the Stour Navigation, considered an artist’s life to be neither gentlemanly nor profitable and repeatedly urged him to join the family business. Constable was helped and inspired by the connoisseur Sir George Beaumont and was moved to tears by Beaumont’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646) by Claude Lorrain, which became the “blueprint” for his later Dedham Vale (1802). But he did not move to London and enter the Royal Academy schools until 1799, when he was twenty-three. Wariness of financial risks and an artist’s low status also affected his personal life. Concannon’s caption for his oil sketch View toward the Rectory, East Bergholt (1810) suggests that its poignant sunset mood reflects the way he gazed at that view from his window, “thinking of his sweetheart Maria Bicknell, whose grandfather lived in the Rectory.” He had to wait seven long years, marked off by weekly letters, until he could afford to marry her after his parents died and his brother Abram took over the Flatford mill.

The contrasts between the two men were personal and domestic as well as artistic. Constable left copious letters, Turner hardly any. Turner was laconic, combative, and ruthless about money, Constable gentle and polite, though his wit could be barbed. Turner kept his private life secret, including his relationships with Sarah Danby and their daughters and with Sophia Booth, leaving room for speculation about his households and erotic sketches. Constable’s devotion to Maria was well known, and he was a doting father to their seven children, although he was sometimes exasperated (the boys once stuck a broom through a canvas), describing them as like “bottled wasps on a southern wall.”

Turner was always “on the wing,” as he put it, and Constable more sedentary. After sketching in the Peak District and Lake District, Constable rarely ventured far from London or Suffolk or the south coast, whereas Turner crisscrossed Britain and Europe, as Moorby notes in a catalog essay, on “horseback, horse-drawn carriage, sailing boats, ferries, often his own two feet,” and later “steam-powered boats and trains that whisked him forth with greater speed and noise.” On his first foray he dashed across the Channel as soon as the Continent was open during the Peace of Amiens in 1802–1803 and reached the Alps. The resulting oils and watercolors included “sublime” landscapes of golden crags and precipitous chasms designed to fill viewers with enjoyably vicarious terror and awe. In scenes such as The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) (1804), he also showed off his technical bravura, Concannon notes, removing wet paint to create mist and “scraping out to reveal the white of the paper, forming rivulets flowing down the mountainside.”

Both men turned to landscape from the start. This was already dear to Constable’s heart. He wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821:

The sound of water escaping from mill dams…Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork. I love such things…. As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such Places. They have always been my delight.

For Turner landscape was a way to make a living. Although not the highest-regarded genre—that was still grand history painting—landscape was “where the buzz was,” with patrons eager to commission views. Another vital stream of Turner’s income, as well as access to a wider public, came from watercolors he made to be engraved for series of “Picturesque Tours” or “Picturesque Views.” Over the years he worked with sixty engravers on more than seventy different projects, involving more than nine hundred prints, and early on, from 1806 to 1819, he published Liber Studiorum, a set of plates “Illustrative of Landscape Compositions.” Constable only turned to prints in his fifties, working with David Lucas on the mezzotints for his English Landscape Scenery (1829–1832).

Turner’s versatility was astounding. His Alpine paintings were followed by even more “sublime” scenes in which the elements overwhelmed all human endeavor, like The Wreck of a Transport Ship (1810), in which the sea, in Moorby’s words, “became a heaving, frothing mass of pigment so that the paint itself seems to be writing and swirling, dragging at the foundering boats and swallowing drowning figures.” He made a stab at history painting, too, beginning with his first classical scene, Aeneas and the Sibyl: Lake Avernus (circa 1798), set against a Claude-inspired landscape, and he also turned to contemporary heroics in canvases like the dizzying The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1806–1808). Past and present often overlapped: in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), the link between the Carthaginian general’s attempt to invade Italy, with the storm swallowing his army, and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was clear to all.

When the artists met for the first time, therefore, seated next to each other at the Academy’s annual king’s birthday dinner in June 1813, Turner was famous, while Constable was noted, if at all, merely as an interesting regional artist. Constable was intrigued. “I was a good deal entertained with Turner,” he told Maria. “I always expected to find him what I did—he is uncouth but has a wonderfull [sic] range of mind.” “Uncouth” may suggest the difference in class or Turner’s contrast to the run of staid Academicians—he never shed his Cockney accent—but “the range of mind” suggests how much and how widely they talked.

During Turner’s rapid rise, Constable had returned each summer to Dedham, where he made painstaking open-air oil sketches. His fervent aim was to transfer to the board or primed paper pinned to the inside of his sketching box not only the accurate details of river and locks, trees and fields, but the entire atmosphere, capturing the play of light, the shimmer on water and rustle of leaves, the scent of hay and the feel of a dusty towpath. He could see Turner’s brilliance—“Did you ever see a painting by Turner, and not wish to possess it?” he once said—but he was proud that he found “an original style & independent of him who would be Lord over all—I mean Turner.”

After their meeting in 1813 Constable stuck stubbornly to his home territory and determined naturalism. In his search for verisimilitude, in the summer of 1814 he painted The Stour Valley and Dedham Village and Boat-Building near Flatford Mill in the open air while watching the laborers work. His breakthrough came when he decided to emulate Turner’s huge canvases, exhibiting The White Horse, the first of his large “six-footers,” as he called them, in 1819. Treating an ordinary landscape and event in this way, emphasizing its authenticity, was entirely novel—on such a large scale, the mundane activity of ferrying a horse across the Stour became monumental and mysterious. The painting’s warm reception was all he hoped for, leading to his election as an associate Academician. In the Examiner, Robert Hunt placed him on Turner’s level for the first time, judging that Constable

has none of the poetry of Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of her portraiture. His Scene on the River Stour is indeed more approaching to the outward lineament and look of trees, water, boats, &c than any of our landscape painters.

More large paintings followed over the next five years, from Stratford Mill (1820) to The Leaping Horse (1825). In an unprecedented move Constable painted full-size oil sketches—now much admired for their impressionistic style—before he worked on the finished paintings. His reputation rose slowly in Britain but suddenly—and unexpectedly—in France. In 1821 the French painter Théodore Géricault, a guest of the Academy that year, saw The Hay Wain and was bowled over by the roughness and spontaneity of the paint handling—the very features that upset Constable’s British critics. The author Charles Nodier agreed. Seen close up, he wrote excitedly, “it is only broad daubings of ill-laid colours.” But stand back a few steps and these were magically resolved into “a picturesque country, a rustic dwelling, a low river whose little waves foam over the pebbles, a cart crossing a ford: It is water, air and sky; it is Ruysdael, Wouversman, or Constable.” Reluctantly, needing the money, Constable sold this and other paintings to a Parisian dealer. When The Hay Wain was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, the freedom of handling, so at odds with the smoothness of French classicism, caused a sensation. Eugène Delacroix allegedly rushed to his studio to alter the background of his Massacre at Chios. His enthusiasm was shared. A host of landscapes à la Constable followed, as Constable himself reported with glee, “laying the foundation,” in Concannon’s words, “for the quintessentially ‘English’ artist to become the father of modern French landscape painting.”

In Britain, while both artists were acclaimed, they were also disparaged as eccentric and “extravagant.” Turner was mocked for his brushwork and vivid colors, particularly yellow, while Constable was attacked for his “crudeness.” His white highlights in particular were thought ludicrous: in 1823 one critic quipped that he had given to “all his trees and herbage the appearance of sleep or snow having fallen.” Constable believed the white flecks added “sparkle.” In the large-scale reworking of Dedham Vale (1828) Concannon judges that they “give the glittering effect of light falling on wet leaves,” but to many “Constable’s snow” was an affectation, allegedly swatted off by Turner as “like the splashings from a white-washed ceiling.”

Criticism could be ignored, but it could also be productive. It was the accusation of choppiness and inaccuracy in his skies, for example, that prompted Constable’s meticulously observed Hampstead cloudscapes, oil sketches that offered a “natural history…of the skies,” as he called it. In a fine catalog essay, Nicholas Robbins (who also contributes an essay to Tim Barringer’s Constable) describes the ways in which his “slow, patient, repetitive acts of looking and recording” allied him with the natural historians and meteorologists of his day.

Constable had taken a house in Hampstead chiefly to have purer air for Maria, who was by then suffering from consumption. In 1824, in search of health-giving sea breezes, the family went to Brighton, where he painted the revolutionary “chain pier,” both a landing stage and a tourist attraction. Chain Pier, Brighton, however, was not a success. When it was exhibited in 1827, the change of subject and the uneasy, overclouded scene drew mixed reviews, while the Academy’s marine painters—including Turner—resented Constable for encroaching on their territory. Turner’s revenge was his own painting of the pier, destined for Petworth, the home of his patron the Earl of Egremont, who had largely financed the project. With the glowing, sunlit Brighton from the Sea (circa 1829), Moorby says,

hidden in plain sight was proof that anything Constable could do, Turner could do—if not necessarily better (that after all is a matter of personal preference)—then at least bolder, brighter and better remunerated.

The Brighton venture did not help Maria, who died of tuberculosis in November 1828. Three months later Constable was finally elected a full Academician. He was still deep in grief. “It has been delayed until I am solitary,” he wrote, “and cannot impart it.”

In Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals, with its magnificent plates and concise, informative captions, Concannon follows their careers with a fine blend of appreciation, scholarship, and intellectual inquiry. Moorby’s Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape is an excellent companion work, dispelling myths and showing how the two artists defined and played off against each other. Tim Barringer’s Constable and Ian Warrell’s Turner in the Yale Center for British Art Collection Series add a further range of reference, with copious illustrations from the substantial Paul Mellon Collection.

Other experts join the anniversary tributes. Among the illuminating essays in the exhibition catalog, Nicole Cochrane explores Turner’s depiction of the ancient world and the fall of Carthage “as a symbol for the cycles of history and the rise and fall of empires,” Emma Roodhouse examines Constable’s East Anglian friendships, Sarah Gould discusses his controversial textures, and Joyce Townsend writes on paint boxes, pigments, and experiments with color. The hum of collective scholarship is loud, particularly in Thomas Ardill’s survey of recent ecocritical approaches, alerting us to how complicit the artists were in the evils of their time. Constable drew Lake District fells with the graphite whose mining was despoiling that scenery. Turner painted the harrowing Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) in 1840 while enjoying the patronage of the plantation owner John Fuller, employed lamp black from whale-oil lamps in his Burning Blubber (1844), and, weirdly and wonderfully, used “Indian Yellow, derived from the urine of cows fed on a diet on mango leaves in rural India.”

Paradoxically, the more we learn about their influences and practices, the more extraordinary it seems that such individual, idiosyncratic geniuses could flourish simultaneously in the British art world. The artist Frank Auerbach, who admired both of them, noted in 2014 that painters “often come in couples, each helping to define the other.” But even he succumbed to the game of metaphors: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” Reductive as that is, something of it rings true with regard to the paintings of their later years—Constable in the early 1830s and Turner in the late 1840s—in which the contrast between Constable’s somber, restless landscapes and Turner’s soaring visions of land, sea and sky, and classical myth is almost overpowering.

Reflecting his urgent search for a way to represent the light and shade of nature, Constable’s late works are full of troubling, dramatic energy. In the atmospheric watercolor Stonehenge (1835), the stones stand perilously upright or poised to tumble, while a double rainbow sweeps across the downpour above them. That curve of light and color also pierces the darkness of his oils, including Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow (1836), while in the turbulent, unfinished Stoke by Neyland (1830), the rainbow that had appeared above the church in the engraving in English Landscape Scenery is missing, as if the canvas were still waiting for Constable’s final touch. In A Cottage at East Bergholt (circa 1833) and On the River Stour (circa 1834–1837), executed in the last years of his life, his thickly laden brush and palette knife seem almost to assault the canvas, creating a tumult of earthy browns and grays and sharp, splattered dashes of white, as if earth and trees and clouds were physically forcing themselves into sight.

When Constable died suddenly at sixty in 1837, Turner had more than a decade left until his death in 1851 at seventy-six. In his last years he was briefly the acting president of the Royal Academy, visited the Continent again, and exhibited some of his finest works. Like Constable’s, his late paintings often revisit scenes he had explored earlier. In The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842), he showed the isolated mountain on Lake Lucerne that he had first painted forty years before, now veiled in mist against a luminous sky. The dawn attracted him. In Norham Castle, Sunrise (circa 1845), he returned again to the ruined Norman castle that he first painted in 1797. Then his watercolor had included precisely drawn fishermen, boats, and cows; now the castle on the Tweed has dissolved into a blue blur against the gold of sky and water. “His delight in his materials is obvious,” writes Concannon. “Painted with thin glazes of colour that in places trickle down the canvas in rivulets, Norham Castle seems to melt in the sun’s rays.”

It is tempting to say that in these late works Constable digs and delves while Turner floats in light. But looking at them today, any compare-and-contrast, earth-and-air approach seems irrelevant. Both artists are breathtaking in different ways. Rivals they were, but they knew they were originals, too. At important moments in their long competition, they recognized that fellowship. When Constable was finally elected a full Academician in 1829, Turner went with their fellow artist George Jones to congratulate him. They parted at one in the morning, Constable wrote, “mutually pleased with one another.”