Britain's Greatest Art Feud: Turner and Constable Side by Side

Image Credit: Yili Liu via Tate Photography

The first thing you will notice upon entering the new Tate Britain exhibition, Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals, is a wall flanked by two portraits of the eponymous subjects, born 250 years ago within 14 months. Between the faces of these two young men (each in their mid-twenties) are their respective diploma pieces - paintings an artist submits upon elevation to the prestigious status of academician - presented 29 years apart.

This stark image highlights that while posterity places these men beside each other, for much of their careers they were anything but - something the exhibition curators appear eager to highlight. The procession of paintings is carefully structured to demonstrate the completely different routes both artists plotted on their journeys to immortality: Turner, the child prodigy, rocketing from his lower-class background straight onto the walls of the academy’s great hall; Constable, painstakingly developing his craft without any immediate honours. Turner’s first displayed oil work The Rising Squall is here, a riverbed study steeped in tempestuous gloom and drama that took the academy by storm, painted when the artist was barely seventeen. Metres away, a Constable piece from the same year sits in a glass cabinet - a stick graffiti representation of his family’s mill, carved into wood for no audience but himself.

There are some inevitable face-offs - how could there not be? We see both artists attempting to mirror the French master Claude Lorrain and paint the Lake District in tandem, each with a singular yet surprisingly convergent style early in their careers; they clash in their vastly different paintings of Brighton Beach and, of course, the pair’s infamous academy jockeying of the 1830s, possibly the only part in their lives where the two men could actually be called ‘rivals’. The most stark comparison can be found here, where Constable’s turbulent Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, dredged in tufted earth and torrid rain is placed - as originally situated in 1831 by Constable himself (provoking rumours of an ‘altercation’ between the two) - next to Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, an ethereal landscape sprung more from poetic imagination than study and emotion, flooded with light, placidity and hazy myth. Both prove arresting masterclasses in immanence and transcendence.

For the most part, the Tate does very little to force comparison between the two: most of the artists’ middle and late period works are displayed in separate rooms. Rather, a clear emphasis is placed on the divergence and development of their distinct styles, with contrasts between the two inviting audiences to recognise the artists’ respective strengths and individuality as opposed to picking a side. Here the exhibition excels, masterpieces such as Constable’s ‘six footers’ and Turner’s paintings of Carthage take nothing from each other, they serve only to exalt each other as truly singular works of genius. Placed together, Constable’s depictions of the Stour have never felt truer to nature, and Turner’s forays into other worlds have never been more fantastic. 

Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals is exhibited at Tate Britain, London from 27 November to 12 April. Tate Members get unlimited free entry to all Tate exhibitions. Become a Member at tate.org.uk/members. Everyone aged 16-25 can visit all Tate exhibitions for £5 by joining Tate Collective. To join for free, visit tate.org.uk/tate-collective.