Turner & Constable Review – A Boiling Sky vs. Two Men and a Dog | coloring

TJurner or Constable: Who’s the boss? Tate Britain’s exhibition of works by artists, subtitled Rivals and Originals, plays with the question. Born a year apart, and both graduates of the Royal Academy Schools in London, they were keenly aware of what the other was doing, in a British art world that was as frenetic and competitive, if incomparably smaller, than it is today (although you should try the Italian Renaissance if you want full-blown rivalries and feuds). Sometimes, they were sought out by the same collectors and painted the same subjects. Turner was encouraged from an early age by his father, a wig maker and barber in Covent Garden. Constable was the son of a Suffolk mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business.

In addition to their contrasting backgrounds, their temperaments couldn’t have been more different. A scene from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as Turner and James Fleet as Constable, is shown in the show, showing the two painters bickering at the Royal Academy’s Painting Day in 1832. Turner added a touch of red, in the form of a float, to his Helvoetsluys seascapes; The city of Utrecht, 64, is going to sea in order to overtake Constable’s painting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, which the painter has been working on for more than a decade. But whatever their rivalry was, it was hardly the strange intimacy between Van Gogh and Gauguin as depicted in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film Lust for Life (Gauguin: “You paint so fast!” Van Gogh: “You look so fast!”). It is worth noting that Constable once wrote in a letter: “Have you ever seen a picture of Turner, and not wanted to own it?”

The last time these two paintings were brought together at the Royal Academy was in 2019, and Helvoetsluys, owned by the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, is not included in the current show. But we have Constable’s folding drawing chair and parts of Turner’s fishing rod and reel as well as various palettes, paint boxes and other tools belonging to each artist. And drawing after drawing after drawing, watercolors and drawings throughout their career.

Compare Turner’s Dolbadern Castle, North Wales, 1800, with its tower looming against a boiling evening sky and its references to the 13th-century struggle for Welsh independence (and the threat of the French Revolution spreading across the Channel), and the works of a Constable’s Diploma submitted to the RA 29 years later, which show a man opening a lock to allow the passage of a boat upriver. This is a painting of two men and a dog, a view across meadows next to a working river, some trees, a distant church, and an enormous sky with passing rain showers. Turner’s painting is unusual and portentous, while Constable’s celebrates an everyday world, though now gone. I can almost smell the river.

Constable invites the eye to wander from the crushing underfoot to a low, distant horizon, imagining things that cannot be seen as the river bends out of sight. Turner made you shiver in the darkness beneath the castle on its promontory. Sammy becomes fond of drama and steampunk, while Constable’s paintings are filled with objects: carts, posts, locks, windmills, cottages, churches, cathedrals, riverboats, horses, donkeys, sheep, barges, and people fishing; Reeds, burdock, willows, cornfields, hedges, elms, oaks, weather, rainbows and clouds. Constable was attracted to “the sound of water leaking from the Mill Dams, the Willows, the old rotting banks, the sticky pillars, the bricks. I like such things… As long as I paint I will never stop painting such places.”

Turner, who has traveled further, introduces us to the mountain passes, wild seas, steamboats, coal barges and atmospheric pollution of London and the Black Country. He depicts the burning of the Houses of Parliament, disasters at sea and incomprehensible storms. He painted Noah’s Ark on the Evening of the Flood and a combination of Goethe’s Theory of Light and Color with Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning After the Flood – Moses Writing Genesis, depicting Moses sitting in a kind of bubble, floating in the ether. Turner paints misfit characters like those of the beloved Baroque landscape painter Claude Lorraine. Turner everywhere. In his painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, 1832, the sun appears like a billiard ball to rest on the horizon, and the distant basalt rocks on the left catch the last rays, as rain moves in, along with a trail of steamboat smoke. That’s great, but then he goes and paints The Golden Bough, a ridiculous jumble of figures in a misty landscape, ornate pines planted here and there, and the little votive sculpture in its blue niche in the rock.

When Turner painted Blizzard: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps in 1812, he depicted Hannibal sitting on his elephant on the horizon, a small detail in the massive canvas. The distant animal, with its raised trunk, looks as menacing as a teapot. What about the lumpy extras in the bottom right corner? It’s like a highly imaginative CGI scene from a movie, more “Lord of the Rings” than “Gladiator,” though Turner had Napoleon Bonaparte in mind, who was often compared to Hannibal. I talk but I don’t care. Where’s my popcorn? Even the title reads like overlaid text in a movie.

Turner liked the specificity of the titles he gave to some of his most grandiose and raucous scenes. They brought a certain amount of truth to all that dyed-in-the-wool mess. In 1842 he painted Blizzard – a steamboat off the mouth of the harbour, signaling in the shallow water, and driving along. It says: “The author was in this storm the night Ariel left Harwich.” We are lost in the brown filth of the chimney, the dust and snow, the raging sea, and the flag that indicates how lost we are. Somehow, we have to negotiate all of this. When he’s specific, Turner is great.

Constable is always determined, steady, even when he is merely staring at the clouds or at the impenetrable darkness of the meadow, and the half-seen moon emerging from behind a bush, in its pale bloom of scattered light. Another contemporary, the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, may have wished to acquire this small piece of unstretched canvas. Constable’s shimmering highlights in his later paintings, those tiny scratches, specks and white spots that seem detached from anything, aerate his busy, reworked canvases and create something utterly riveting to the passing world.

But this feeling was already present in Constable’s cloud studies, which he painted in the early 1820s. Birds are flying, clouds are rising and sagging, layers of green, gray and bluish clouds, clouds glowing and illuminated by the setting sun, clouds drenched with rain and others that are almost melting, clouds with bright edges and clouds reduced to a few indistinct marks, gathered in gradations of light and dark touches. I prefer these small, almost informal studies (with how specific they are!) to almost everything else in the entire exhibition. They feel suspended in the here and now as much as they record a particular day nearly 200 years ago. At his best, Turner can be quite precise, especially at his most improvised, but Constable impressed me more.