‘He’s been here and fired a gun’: How the rivalry between Turner and Constable spiced up Britain’s art scene

In the spring of 1831, with the Royal Academy exhibition soon to open, John Constable pulled a fast one.

Exploiting his position as member of the Committee of Arrangement, responsible for hanging the pictures on display, he moved his painting, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, right in the middle of Turner’s two canvases, Caligula’s Palace and Bridge and The Vision of Medea. Turner, whose Caligula had initially been meant to hang in the centre of the wall in the Great Room at Somerset House, was incensed.

Art historians such as Ian Warrell would call that moment ‘a key battle in a longer war’ — the rivalry that had long pitted the celebrated London upstart against the wealthier, better connected but sometimes under-appreciated Suffolk merchant’s son. Later this year, Tate Britain will delve into that ‘war’ with ‘Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals’, an exhibition that examines the relationship between Georgian Britain’s two greatest artists through 170 paintings and works on paper, including Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Ohio, US, which has not been seen in Britain for more than a century.

Born a year apart, Turner in 1775 in Covent Garden, Constable in 1776 in East Bergholt, the two artists followed very different paths. Turner was a child prodigy, entering the Royal Academy Schools when he was only 14, exhibiting his first watercolour there a year later and being elected full Royal Academician in 1802 at 27 — an honour for which Constable, who was only admitted to the Academy Schools in 1800, had to wait until the ripe age of 52, having failed multiple times in the preceding years. Where Turner was acclaimed as a genius from the outset, Constable — his paintings often hung in lesser rooms at shows such as the RA exhibition — was at times neglected (The Hay Wain was overlooked by many major newspapers in 1821), or, worse, harshly criticised for his ‘grubs’ of paint and for his ‘snow’, the flecks of white he used to evoke light.

One favoured the drama and grandeur of Nature, the other the beauty and quietude of his native East Anglia, with the odd foray at Brighton and Hampstead. Yet, both were committed to landscape painting, which (in part because of them) was in the ascendant as Britain’s own artistic genre, and both approached it in an original way — different from everyone else’s, including one another. This made comparisons between the two almost inevitable. Writing about White Horse, the first of Constable’s six-footers in 1819, Robert Hunt of The Examiner, noted: ‘He does not give a sentiment, a soul to the exterior of Nature, as Mr Turner does; he does not at all exalt the spectator’s mind, which Mr Turner eminently does, but he gives her an outward look, her complexion and physical countenance, with more exactness. He has none of the poetry of Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of her portraiture’.

Other contemporary art critics were rather more vicious, using one artist to whack the other. More often, it was to the detriment of Constable, but not always: ‘Turner has a fine poetical scene but it is so outrageous in colour as even to eclipse all his former extravagancies,’ reported the Monthly Magazine in 1823. ‘These visionary absurdities are upon a par with much of the music and poetry of the day: affectation and refinement run mad. Constable’s fresh and powerful transcripts from nature are convincing proofs of her superiority to the sophistications of art.’