Turner or Constable: who’s the boss? Tate Britain’s exhibition of work by the two artists, subtitled Rivals and Originals, fudges the question. Born a year apart and both alumni of the Royal Academy schools in London, each was keenly aware of what the other was doing, in a British art world that was as febrile and competitive, if immeasurably smaller, than it is today (although you should try the Italian Renaissance if you want full-blooded rivalries and enmities). Sometimes, they sought the same collectors and painted the same subjects. Turner was encouraged from an early age by his father, a Covent Garden wigmaker and barber; Constable was the son of a Suffolk mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business.
As well as their contrasting backgrounds, their temperaments could not have been more different. A scene from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as Turner and James Fleet as Constable, plays in the show, presenting the two painters bickering on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1832. Turner added a touch of red, in the form of a buoy, to his seascape Helvoetsluys; the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea in order to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, on which the painter had been working for more than a decade. But whatever their rivalry entailed, it was hardly the odd-couple bromance between Van Gogh and Gauguin depicted in the 1956 Vincente Minnelli movie Lust for Life (Gauguin: “You paint too fast!” Van Gogh: “You look too fast!”). It is worth remembering that Constable once wrote in a letter: “Did you ever see a picture by Turner, and not wish to possess it?”
