Joseph and John
Joseph Turner was born in 1775, John Constable in 1776. In other words, it’s just about 250 years since their joint births. Tate owns big holdings of paintings, watercolours, sketches and related paraphernalia (paintboxes, journals, letters, sketchbooks) by both of them, so they’ve used the anniversaries to bring lots of this up out of the archives – plus substantial loans from other collections – in order to create a blockbuster exhibition placing two of England’s most popular painters side by side. The aim is to compare Turner and Constable’s differing origins, styles, subject matters and careers, and the way that, even during their lifetimes, they were pitted against each other as rivals, with rival visions of art.
Turner versus Constable: ‘The Golden Bough’ (left) by Turner, faces off against ‘Dedham Lock’ (right) by Constable, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Obviously, it’s full of lot and lots of good stuff but I confess I didn’t really enjoy it. I finished it with a great sense of relief and couldn’t wait to escape.
Massive exhibition
I expected the exhibition to be packed and it was, but I hadn’t anticipated it being quite so big, thorough and exhaustive. It contains some 190 oil paintings, watercolours and sketches, as well as seven or eight display cases containing everything from their paintboxes and brushes to Turner’s dismantled fishing rod (!).
Four outdoor sketches by Turner along with his dismantlable fishing rod, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Most exhibitions are in 7 or 8 rooms but this one stretches to 12, concluding with a set of videos by contemporary artists (Bridget Riley, George Shaw, Emma Stibbon and Frank Bowling) describing aspects of Joseph or John which inspire their own practice.
The wall labels are admirably thorough in introducing each of the 11 or so major themes which each room addresses, plus detailed captions for many of the paintings, watercolours, sketches and objects – but there are just so many that by the end I was full, I couldn’t read anything more, and I was relieved to give up the effort.
Also, heretical though it is to admit it, I don’t really like Turner, I never have; and I like Constable in small doses but here, faced with 80 or more works, the brilliantly glorious works are diluted by a lot of much more humdrum stuff. Exposed at such length, over so many works, the weaknesses of both artists become more and more glaring and – for me – began to drown out their strengths.
For example whereas Turner arguably came into his own in his later years, from 1830 onwards, the final room shows four of Constable’s last works from 1835 to 37, and I thought they were really dire: they look like his Hay Wain-style landscapes but put through a blender or painted by someone with serious eyesight problems (details below).
In the end I found myself equally put off Turner’s huge shimmering light experiments and Constable’s sometimes lovely but often very scrappy Suffolk landscapes, and found relief in the much smaller, lighter watercolours and sketches by both artists, although Turner was generally better at these (see below).
To put it another way, I came away from the National Gallery’s small, thoughtful, very focused exhibition about the Hay Wain liking and appreciating Constable more. Whereas I left this exhibition with a measurably lower opinion of him, and hoping I don’t see another Constable for a long time.
Main points
Constable focused largely on the English countryside, especially the Stour Valley in Suffolk, developing a distinctive practice of outdoor oil sketching to capture natural light, weather, and atmosphere with unprecedented immediacy. His textured brushwork, bright colours, and close study of skies challenged academic conventions and gradually earned critical recognition.
Turner, by contrast, was a prolific traveller whose work ranged across Britain and Europe. He explored dramatic subjects from the sublime forces of nature to modern technology, working across oil, watercolour, and print. His radical handling of colour and light, particularly in watercolour, pushed the medium to new artistic heights.
So Constable was, on the whole, a homebody, whereas there’s an entire room devoted to Turner’s extensive trip to Italy, displaying his sketchbooks, explaining the detailed preparations he made, showing preparatory sketches and some of the huge oils he did of dramatic Alpine scenery. For the rest of his life was liable at the drop of a hat to produce another enormous work set in Venice or Rome or the Alps.
Still, the early works produced soon after that trip can be breath-taking.
The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) by JMW Turner (1804) © Abbot Hall, Kendal (Lakeland Arts Trust)
Room summary
Room 1. Starting out (8 prints, 10 paintings)
Eight paintings including Turner’s self portrait and two portraits of Constable.
Turner was born in London, the son of a Covent Garden barber, Constable to a prosperous family in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt.
As a teenager, Turner earned money alongside his art studies at the Royal Academy. He worked as an architectural draughtsman’s assistant and a watercolour copyist, which introduced him to a wide range of art. He was a commercially minded, fast-rising young star who first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790 aged just 15.
By contrast, Constable was largely self-taught and undertook extensive sketching tours in order to perfect is artistic technique, not exhibiting at the Royal Academy until 12 years after turner, in 1802.
Both trained at the Royal Academy. Training at the Royal Academy centred on drawing the human figure. It aimed to produce painters of grand historical and mythological subjects. Landscape was far down its artistic hierarchy – so the main way both artists were innovators was in proclaiming landscape painting as a high genre in its own right.
It’s odd that the Academy focused on figure drawing when both Turner and Constable are dreadful, awful painters of human beings. It’s one of the things I dislike about them both. Any Turner painting with people in is going to be embarrassingly bad (see below). Constable’s figures are more superficially attractive until you go up close and see how gawkily the bodies are composed and how terrible the faces are, if he’s bothered with them at all. Constable’s clouds, ten out of ten. His faces, nil.
Room 2. Constable sketching outdoors (14 sketches, display case, chair)
Fourteen sketches and a display case showing his paintbox and palette. My wife and I both thought the most interesting thing in this room was Constable’s sketching chair.
Constable’s outdoor sketching chair in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Room 3. Turner in the Alps and Italy (4 big paintings, 7 sketches, 5 sketchbooks, display case)
A pause in the long war with France in 1802 allowed the 27-year-old Turner to travel to Paris, then on south to the Alps, Switzerland and the Val d’Aosta. Thirteen years later, when the wars finally ended in 1815, he went again. His extensive preparations for the six-month trip included reading guidebooks and making sketches of other artists’ views of key sites to visit. Turner was hungry for Italy’s scenic riches. He filled 23 sketchbooks five of which are on display here and came home with imagery that would underpin decades of finished paintings.
One of Turner’s extravagant fantasias from Italian history – Caligula’s Palace and Bridge by J.M.W. Turner (1831) Tate
Remember I was saying how poor Turner’s human figures are? From a distance they pass, they appear to fit in with the blurry mode of the paintings. But go up close and they’re embarrassing. Here’s a close-up of the most prominent two figures in this work.
Detail of Caligula’s Palace and Bridge by J.M.W. Turner (1831) Tate
The basket and hula hoop and kettle and the blue cloak at bottom right, yes. The two goats at top right, yes. But the two human figures on the left? The bloke’s legs, yes, but their faces? They look like Punch and Judy.
Room 4. Turner’s watercolours (6 watercolours, 10 sketchbooks)
Going back and forth through the rooms, slowly overcoming the sheer scale of some of the enormous paintings here, it takes the mind a little while to adjust to the scale of the smaller, more delicate sketches and watercolours. Eventually I came to think these were the works I liked best.
Turner at his most attractive: four (relatively) small watercolours, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
A contemporary critic wrote: ‘Another mused: ‘blended and sometimes delicately contrasted as [Turner’s] colours are – the effects are exquisitely tender, but not without sufficient force, from a certain magic arrangement, a graphic secret of his own’ and in many of them, you can see what he meant.
Room 5. Turner’s studio (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)
Turner’s studio was a chaotic shambles. His landlady owned seven Manx cats and these are allowed to roam over wet paintings; we know this because their paw prints have been found. At his death it was discovered that he’d used his own paintings to block up gaps in the roof and had cut a catflap into one of them.
Room 6. Constable fields and sky (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)
Most contemporary artists made extensive sketches on location then took them back to their studios to work up into finished compositions under controlled indoor conditions. In 1814 Constable began completing entire paintings on location, out of doors, and there are plenty of examples in the Hay Wain / Dedham Lock manner, as well as numerous preparatory sketches.
Taking this a step further, in 1819, Constable rented a house in Hampstead, then a village outside London where he started making rapid oil sketches of clouds, a practice he called ‘skying’. These works reflect Constable’s keen interest in weather.
Some of Constable’s cloud studies in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
His preoccupation with the sky is evident in his dramatic 1823 depiction of Salisbury Cathedral, which became another recurring subject and is given the full Mona Lisa treatment in this show, complete with visitor bench to sit and gaze in awe.
Constable’s painting of Salisbury cathedral given the full treatment in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Room 7. Big is beautiful (5 Turner, 4 Constable huge paintings)
Both artists struggled to get noticed and one easy way to do this was to make their paintings big, really big, ginormous. Turner was already doing his huge classical and mythological paintings. In 1819 Constable joined him by exhibiting the first of his huge canvases (what he called his ‘6-footers’) ‘The White Horse’, and its appearance for the first time triggered comparisons with Turner. They were both now competing in sheer size – but what a complete difference in subject matter and style.
The White Horse by John Constable (1819) © The Frick Collection, New York (photo by Joseph Coscia Jr)
This feels like a great painting. If there had been just 4 or 5 works like this you’d have gone away inspired. It’s the fact that it’s accompanied by about 80 others, sketches, scraps and some decidedly bad works, which dilutes its effect.
Room 8. Fire and water (4 massive paintings: 3 JC, 1 T)
The rivalry was real. By the late 1820s Turner was the well-established master in all forms of landscape (oil, watercolour, prints). Constable only achieved official recognition in 1829 when he was finally made a member of the Royal Academy. To quote the curators:
Two years later, they came to blows. Artists hated being hung next to Turner in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition because his paintings ‘caught your eye the instant you entered the room’. In 1831, Constable took up the challenge. As a member of the committee responsible for placement of works in the exhibition, he hung his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows next to Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge. The arrangement gave Constable’s own painting prime position. At a dinner party, Turner apparently came ‘down upon him like a sledge-hammer’. One onlooker recalled dramatically that Constable ‘wriggled… like a detected criminal’.
Room 9. Late Constable: ‘beyond Constable country’ (9 sketches, 3 big paintings)
With election to the Academy in 1829, Constable moved to expand his subject matter, producing works set in Brighton and London, away from his home turf in the Stour Valley. He tackled coastal storms and grand neoclassical architecture. I didn’t like his Brighton paintings but some of the sketches of the beach were appealing.
Rainstorm over the Sea by John Constable (1824-1828) © Photo Royal Academy of Art (photo by John Hammond)
I was tickled to read that Constable didn’t like Brighton and dismissed it as ‘Piccadilly by the seaside’. Plus ça change, eh?
In this room the curators are showing a clip from Mike Leigh’s 2014 movie, Mr Turner, dramatising another famous moment in their rivalry, when both painters had work hung in the 1832 Academy exhibition and Turner (played by Timothy Spall) adds a last-minute red buoy to his painting Helvoetsluys: Fishermen at Sea in order to catch the viewer’s eye and distract it from Constable’s long-laboured over piece, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge – which triggered Constable (played by the stalwart character actor James Fleet) to walk out in a huff. At least it’s all very dramatic in movieland.
Room 10. Late Turner (9 paintings, 8 sketches)
Turning 60 in 1835, Turner could have rested on his financial position and slowed down but he kept up the pace. 1835 saw him take one of his most extensive and taxing European sketching tours and he continued to travel abroad for another decade. He made topical paintings of contemporary subjects, including the fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament.
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by JMW Turner (1835) Cleveland Museum of Art
Favourite locations like Venice and the Swiss Alps came back into focus with repeat visits. There’s a really dreadful giant monster of a painting depicting Juliet and her nurse in a typically gauzy, highly romanticised Venice when, of course, the play is set in Verona, 120 kilometres away.
On the other hand, some of these late watercolours are truly visionary, and the curators are right to single out The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842) as awe inspiring.
The Blue Rigi, Sunrise by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1842) Tate
Room 11. Landscape and memory (3 Turner, 4 Constable, 4 prints)
Constable died in 1837, by now accepted as a classic. But his last years were saddened by the absence of his dead wife. The curators suggest his late paintings are clouded by melancholy but optimistically claim they reverberate with energy. Well, the four they hang in the final room are awful. They revert to the Suffolk subject matter but as if someone had thrown a bucket of mud over them. The palette has lost all its brightness and sparkle, everything is black and grey and mud. A couple of them have sets of diagonal white slashes across them as if someone had repeatedly stabbed them with a knife. They’re so horrible I made a list to show you:
- On the river Stour (1834)
- A Cottage in East Bergholt (1836)
- Hampstead Heath with rainbow (1836)
- Stoke by Nayland (1837)
My wife wondered whether he must have been suffering from some eye problem, cataracts or something, which would explain their dirgelike darkness, their fevered, cluttered, murky feeling. But that can’t be true because alongside it the curators hang a marvellously limpid and detailed drawing of fir trees on Hampstead Heath.
Fir Trees by John Constable (c. 1833) The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford, UK/Bridgeman Images
(Incidentally, you can see the join three-quarters of the way down the work; this is because Constable had originally drawn just the upper part of the tree but ended up devoting so much time and effort to it, that he glued on an extra strip of paper at the bottom so he could continue it down to the roots.)
Anyway, the point is that, if he could produce extremely clear, detailed and lucid drawings like this, then the dire appearance of a late painting like On the river Stour (1834) was an artistic choice.
By contrast with the murky Constable, this final room contains arguably the best Turner in the exhibition, certainly the one I liked best, Norham Castle, a work of pure luminousness, almost completely untainted by worldly subject matter.
Norham Castle, Sunrise by Joseph Mallord William Turner (c.1845) Tate
Room 12
This room is devoted to a big video screen onto which is projected an 11-minute-long film featuring interviews of contemporary artists Bridget Riley, George Shaw, Emma Stibbon and Frank Bowling, giving their opinions about T and C.
What’s really striking about this video is that it contains many tasteful close-ups of T and C’s works and these often make the paintings seem much more interesting and exciting and innovative than the complete, wider works do. It was a revelation to think of both their paintings like this, as collections of good bits which frequently impress more as inventive and wonderful details than they do as often contrived and stagey wholes.
Related links
- Turner and Constable continues at Tate Britain until 12 April 2026
- Exhibition guide
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