It is surprisingly difficult to discuss Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) without mentioning John Constable (1776-1837), or vice versa. This is an inevitable consequence of the extraordinary coincidence that two of Great Britain’s most stellar national treasures not only worked in the same field of pioneering landscape painting but were also born just 14 months apart. Published in the 250th anniversary year of the former’s birth and with the latter’s coming in 2026, Turner & Constable: Art, Life, Landscape is an important new study by Nicola Moorby, the curator of British art 1790-1850 at Tate, which explores and celebrates the giants of Romantic British art side-by-side.
Moorby perceptively traces two mutually informative lives and careers, which have been followed individually many times before but never so fully in parallel. Distilling the existing literature covering these expansively chronicled artists, while adding fresh dimensions, is no mean feat. A further challenge is that Turner’s exhibiting career started 12 years earlier than Constable’s, whom he also outlived by 14 years. This imbalance is skilfully overcome by Moorby’s thematic approach within a chronological framework that accords each artist equal attention.
Constable’s The White Horse (1819)
The Frick Collection
One chapter, for example, compares the ways in which the painters treated their own “home” rivers during the first two decades of the 19th century. In Turner’s Thames and Constable’s Stour (Suffolk) is found their defining approaches to art: Turner’s refinement of landscape observation into grand and wide-ranging narratives, Constable’s into the essence of his deep engagement with places of personal significance. Moorby’s discussion of this culminates in the first of many written reviews to compare the artists directly, with Robert Hunt in 1819 concluding that Constable “has none of the poetry of Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of her portraiture”. Later, Moorby demonstrates how Constable injected seriousness and impact into landscape “portraiture” by using large-scale canvases and through his subtle absorption of the Old Masters, to which might also be added a tendency to embellish what he saw on the spot; the same compositional dog, for example, appears in several of his most famous works.
While Moorby’s account consistently demonstrates her protagonists’ common cause of progressing British landscape painting to an elevated status, their old fundamental differences are allowed to emerge unforced: Turner, the self-made, guarded bachelor who travelled widely and whose art—frequently based on rapid-fire pencil sketches—was multi-faceted in terms of both media and subject matter, achieving a meteoric path to success (he was elected a Royal Academician in 1802) before increasingly dividing opinion from mid-career onwards; Constable, the middle-class, devoted husband and family man with a private income, whose art was predominantly one of oil paintings based on sketches done in the same medium and primarily focused on a few sites in eastern and southern England, who struggled to find buyers and recognition until his mature career (finally elected a Royal Academician 27 years after Turner in 1829).
Famous flashpoints
The book neatly chronicles all their recorded meetings with credible suggestions as to what might have been discussed. Critically, we are reminded that Turner very rarely had anything to say verbally about Constable, while the latter frequently expressed his opinion the other way: sometimes complimentary, often bitter and jealous. Also covered are the two famous flashpoints that occurred before the opening of successive Royal Academy exhibitions: in 1831, when Constable—serving on that year’s selection committee—hung his own Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows in between two of Turner’s classical pictures; and in 1832, when Turner slapped a blob of red onto his grey marine-piece Helvoetsluys, later refashioning it into a buoy, possibly in response to the reds in Constable’s adjacent The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (an event re-enacted in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, Mr. Turner). Turner was described as attacking Constable “like a ferret” in the first instance; Constable accused Turner of firing a gun in the second. But Moorby reminds us that these events are each only recorded by one person, albeit the trustworthy fellow painters David Roberts and C.R. Leslie respectively, and she thoughtfully reconsiders their accounts in the light of important contextual mitigation.
The book also makes clear that it is wrong to overdo the stereotype of Turner and Constable as success and failure personified. Constable’s often-overlooked initial progress once in London is emphasised, as are the points in the 1820s when his work won serious admiration while Turner’s found detractors, especially as the latter’s use of modern yellows became more pronounced in the wake of his first proper visit to Italy in 1819. Constable’s fresher and natural style, meanwhile, began to be regarded as particularly English and indeed the envy of foreigners following the award of a gold medal for The Hay Wain at the Paris Salon of 1824. Paradoxically, Turner received little attention abroad during his lifetime despite his frequent continental travels. It did not matter that no one in the French audience would have known the backwaters of Suffolk, nor that Constable never ventured abroad; it was his direct approach to nature that appealed, ultimately exerting a greater influence on the Impressionists than Turner ever would. Nevertheless, despite a levelling of the critical field and a short-lived period of commercial success for Constable in France, Turner’s sales and income always remained vastly superior.
Business smarts
Moorby brilliantly demonstrates Turner’s business acumen by the example of the 1805 painting The Shipwreck. Sold to a collector but, before its delivery, hired out for engraving, with several cost-price impressions given to Turner, it thereby ensured three sources of income from one image. This wheeze is contrasted with Constable’s time-consuming and expensive practice of making full-scale oil sketches for his exhibited pictures, in effect making one painting for the price of two. Further fresh insights are injected through the author’s fieldwork: for example, at East Bergholt Church, where we learn of those buried in the graves represented in Constable’s Royal Academy exhibit of 1810. Other poignant thoughts include how the same artist’s mother might have felt in 1813 when she saw her son’s paintings of their obscure hamlet displayed in front of London society, and the impact of his duties as a parent to seven children, both before and after he became a widower.
Turner’s life and work is always more elusive than Constable’s, whose extensive letters record his thoughts and feelings across decades. This often requires, therefore, a greater degree of conjecture in considering Turner; for example, Moorby makes a case for the works he made for Petworth’s “Carved Room” in the late 1820s as being done partially in response to Constable. While there is no paper trail recording this project, its final form and lengthy resolution might additionally be considered in the broader context of the 3rd Earl of Egremont’s carefully curated scheme across Petworth’s state rooms. It was ultimately the powerfully delivered poetic gravitas of Turner’s art that coincided with the grandeur of Petworth; the earl happily entertained Constable as a house guest but was not interested in his direct responses to nature. This point of difference is reflected by Moorby in a typically eloquent turn of phrase: “Turner’s recurring theme was the inevitability of one epoch succeeding another. Constable’s was consecrating the fleeting moment.”
She finishes with an incisive analysis of how both artists have been represented by those national museums that have become the posthumous and indirect repositories of large groups of their works. Particularly salient is a discussion of the implications of anachronistically displaying unfinished pictures and preparatory sketches. Moorby’s unmissable exhibition Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s House, Twickenham (until 26 October) showcases the artist’s rarely seen and exquisite watercolour studies of animals in varying degrees of finish. Taken from nature, and with no obscure narratives or guns being fired, Constable, surely, would have loved them.
• Nicola Moorby, Turner & Constable: Art, Life, Landscape. Yale University Press, 352pp, 40 colour illustrations, £25 (hb), published 11 March
