The names of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner have been linked so closely for so long that it comes as a surprise to learn, about a third of the way through Nicola Moorby’s engaging joint study of Britain’s two greatest painters, that they didn’t meet until 1813, when the two men had been in London pursuing artistic glory with varying levels of success for a decade and a quarter-century, respectively. Given their vastly different temperaments, personalities, upbringings, and aesthetic sensibilities, perhaps the bigger surprise is that they should have met at all. As near as they were in time and space, they remained, thanks to their contrasting and conflicting visions, worlds apart. Yet different as they were, they were bound by a mutual conviction in the dignity and validity of landscape not only as a legitimate genre of painting, but as a distinct and unique art form in its own right.
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On the surface, the portrait of Turner and Constable painted by Moorby in her new book about the two artists is one rendered in familiar colors. One was the child of a London barber and an emotionally disturbed mother, the other scion of a prosperous country miller and raised in comfort if not gentility. The former, born in 1775, was a striver, restless, always on the go; there was something inescapably urban about him. The latter, born in that monumental year of 1776, was firmly rooted in his beloved Suffolk. One, if not exactly cosmopolitan, evinced a lifelong wanderlust. The other reveled in his provincialism.
The older had liaisons and children, but, “secretive to a fault,” much about his family life is still obscure, the filial affection he showed toward his father translating not at all into paternal affection for his offspring. The younger, “an open book” on the other hand, was a devoted husband and doting father who cherished domestic bliss. If one was the paragon of motion, movement, and “the inevitable transience of life,” the other became “a byword for nostalgia, tradition, and quintessential English countryside.” One was “fire and heat” and a “radical modern,” the other “water and coolness” and an “anti-modern conservative.”
Several ironies emerge from Moorby’s diptych. For example, it was Turner, from a much less respectable background, who proved himself more adept at navigating the rigid hierarchies of the Royal Academy of Arts, thus securing favor and advancement far more rapidly than his rural counterpart. Yet in a sense, this made Constable, ostensibly the more conservative of the two, the true radical, shunning the expectations of patrons and purveyors alike. Turner had no compunction about painting whatever was asked of him. Not so Constable, who for a time abandoned the London rat race for the more welcoming climes of his native East Bergholt, where he sought “an original artistic voice — an expression of the truth of nature through means he did not believe, as yet, to exist.” And although it was Turner who traveled extensively on the continent, it was the resolutely immovable Constable who gained the only success in Europe either enjoyed in their lifetimes when The Hay Wain (1821) made a considerable splash in France in the 1820s.
Constable was a notorious homebody by practice and inclination. He was the painter of the body’s eye, Turner that of the mind’s. Constable had to see it to paint it. His art was grounded in the present and the concrete, and when he finally came to the public notice, it was his “realism” that was one of the main sources of praise; no one, critics proclaimed, was able more exactly to capture nature’s likeness. Turner had no difficulty traveling in space (and time) mentally, and unlike Constable, he did so physically, too. “Painting is but another word for feeling,” Constable wrote in 1821, and he could not feel other places. “I should paint my own places best.”
So far, so conventional. Where Moorby, a British art historian and curator, challenges received wisdom, and this is the chief strength of the book, is in her reconsideration of the nature of Turner and Constable’s relationship and how its reduction to a rivalry has colored perceptions of their legacies. That legendary rivalry, she insists, was more apparent than real, and she marshals a strong case. For one thing, Turner had been established for a decade in his career before Constable embarked on his. Turner also came to public attention long before Constable did. It wasn’t until the 1820s that they came together in the critical and popular imaginations, for it took that long for Constable to make a name for himself. They were never really in competition with each other, never interacted with each other that much until Constable was finally elevated to full membership in the RA (a full quarter-century after Turner, who garnered that accolade at the nearly unheard age of 26). “Posterity expected and wanted a rivalry, and therefore may have engineered one” by making conflict the defining feature of their association. But, Moorby writes, it is “more helpful to see these men in unison.”
In particular, Moorby contests the long-standing understanding of the two most renowned (indeed, really the only two) episodes of their putative antagonism, Turner’s supposed dressing down of Constable for his placement of a Turner piece between two of his own at the 1831 RA exhibition and Turner’s adding a smear of red paint to his painting Helvoetsluys at 1832’s, an incident memorably recreated in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, Mr. Turner. Moorby reframes these occurrences as the kind of hijinks and joshing that occur between peers and colleagues, and not evidence of animosity. In contemporary terms, this was locker room trash talk, not a diss track.
The Turner-Constable rivalry, Moorby contends, was factitious, the result of happenstance and the posthumous continuation of the pairing and juxtaposition imposed on them in life. Not least because the Turner usually opposed to Constable is one Suffolk’s favorite son never encountered. Turner didn’t become Turner until after Constable’s death in 1837. It is his late pictures, those created in the last years of his life, for which he is best known, all of them painted after his purported rival’s demise.
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Constable died just before Victoria ascended the throne. Turner lived to see the Crystal Palace. Simply surviving long enough to die in the 15th year of the reign of a queen who herself lived into the 20th century confers on him a sort of spurious modernity. Constable saw steamboats, but they are conspicuously absent from his paintings. They are all over Turner’s, including at the forefront of arguably his greatest, The Fighting Temeraire (1839). Even as he saw the future, Constable refused to paint it. Turner couldn’t stop doing so.
Both men spoke, then and now, through their art. And here, at least, they can speak to and about each other. “Turner’s life and works are an illuminating guide to Constable’s, and vice versa.” In this dialogue, avers Moorby, we can see that they were using the same language. “Turner’s recurring theme was the inevitability of one epoch succeeding another. Constable’s was the fleeting moment.” But both “understood landscape as uniquely suited to exploring the passage of time.” In time’s ceaseless flow, landscape gives us something to hold on to. “Their art is a reminder of what the natural world makes us feel as individuals, grounding us within life’s bigger picture.” As different as they were, together, Turner and Constable changed the way we see the world and our place in it.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X @varadmehta.