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2 days ago
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JMW Turner appears on £20 notes and gives his name to Britain’s most avant garde contemporary art prize. John Constable’s work adorns countless mugs and jigsaws. Both are emblematic English artists, but in the popular imagination, Turner is perceived as daring and dazzling, Constable as nice but a little bit dull. In a Radio 4 poll to find the nation’s favourite painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which even features in the James Bond film Skyfall – won. Constable’s The Hay Wain came second. Born only a year later, Constable was always playing catch-up: Turner became a member of the Royal Academy at 27, while Constable had to wait until he was 52.
To mark the 250th anniversary of their births, Tate Britain is putting on the first major exhibition to display the two titans head to head. Shakespeare and Marlowe, Mozart and Salieri, Van Gogh and Gauguin – creative rivalries are the stuff of biopics. Mike Leigh’s 2014 film shows Turner (Timothy Spall) adding a touch of red to his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1832. Critics delighted in dubbing them “Fire and Water”. The enthralling new Tate show is billed as a battle of rivals, but it also tells another story. Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too.
Painting mill workers and bargemen was groundbreaking at a time when grandiose classical themes – favoured by Turner – were de rigueur. Like Jane Austen (whose 250th anniversary was celebrated this year), Constable is often accused of ignoring the external world and harsh realities of 18th-century rural life. But his bucolic scenes redefined what a painting could be. Echoing Wordsworth’s Romantic manifesto in the Lyrical Ballads (1800) that poets should take “incidents and situations from common life”, Constable wrote in 1832 that his art “is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up”.
Today, Constable’s spirit can be found in the council estates and abandoned garages of the Coventry artist George Shaw, as well as the hedges and lanes of David Hockney’s late paintings of his beloved Yorkshire Wolds. Every age has found new meanings and inspiration in Constable and Turner. They can still cause a stir. Turner’s abolitionist 1840 Slave Ship – believed to have been inspired by the Zong massacre, in which more than 130 enslaved people were thrown overboard by the British captain for the insurance money – has been reworked by the poet David Dabydeen and the installation artist Sondra Perry to give a black perspective. In 1980, Constable was weaponised in Peter Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missiles as a protest against US nuclear weapons being based in the English countryside – a cold-war riposte to the biscuit-tin nostalgia.
The climate emergency gives a renewed urgency to their work. Their influence can be seen in the cracking icebergs and crumbling coastlines of Emma Stibbon’s paintings and the elemental installations of Olafur Eliasson. A terrible storm at sea or dark clouds over Salisbury Cathedral – Turner and Constable captured not just moments in time but the spirit of their age. In recording technological innovation, political upheaval, inequality, the shadows of war, and a rapidly changing natural environment, the work of both artists resonates with our own era. Displaying them side by side encourages us to see such familiar paintings in a whole new light.
