The most spectacular artistic rivalry in British history
who is the greatest British painter ever?
Is it Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose glowing, occasionally abstract, visions of sea and sky and the violent elements Or is it his contemporary John Constable, with his acute observations of the clouds, trees and changing light of his native Suffolk ?
There are of course other heroes of British painting – Gainsborough, Bacon, Freud and Hodgkin – but Constable and Turner stand apart as both had a profound influence on the birth of modernism. The way they broke out of the conventions of "correct" painting to try to capture the freshness, change and sheer reality of nature helped inspire the impressionists and gave these two landscape masters a place at the heart of modern art's history.
Matisse, for example, revered Turner, whom he imagined living in a London basement and only letting in the light once a week to flood his mind.
But who was best? This is a vulgar 21st-century thing to ask; it was a stupid question asked too by their contemporaries. The rivalry between these men born a year apart – Turner in 1775, Constable in 1776 – was played out in the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy, where the artists of early 19th-century Britain measured up to each other.
Today's RA summer exhibition is a pale shadow of what was then a spectacular social occasion at Somerset House in London, where artistic reputations were made and broken.
It was here, in May 1832, that Constable showed his painting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. He had worked intermittently on the 6ft-wide canvas for a decade, striving to create a grand public statement. It was hung alongside Turner's latest seascape, a picture of Dutch ships in a gale that was one of its creator's more muted works.
At last the genius of Constable had its day – or so it seemed.
The surface of Constable's painting glittered with speckled sunshine, casting its rival in the shade. Turner came and stared. He went away. He came back with his brush and palette. Loading his brush with bright red, he put a glob of bloody, blazing colour in the middle of his green painted sea. Suddenly it looked exciting, experimental – set alight by red in a moment of pure painterly freedom.
"He has been here and fired a gun," wrote the shellshocked Constable.
Mark Evans, curator of the V&A's new Constable exhibition, concedes this true story captures a basic difference between the painters. "Constable is the technician," says Evans, "and Turner is the magician."
"You could say if you wanted to be rude that Constable was a more plodding artist than Turner."
Popular culture seems to agree. Mr Turner, not Mr Constable, is the subject of Mike Leigh's award-winning biopic to be released in October. A splendidly grimacing Timothy Spall as Turner contemptuously applies his famous glob of red paint in front of an admiring crowd while Constable watches helplessly. The film's trailer calls Turner "Britain's greatest artist" – there is no room for ambiguity.
Yet Constable has serious, heavyweight support in this clash of the plain-air titans. Lucian Freud, for one, loved him. In 2003 Freud selected an acclaimed exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, Constable: Le Choix de Lucian Freud.
"Lucian perceived Constable as a fellow realist," says Evans. "Everybody talks about truth to nature in art, but how many people really mean it? With Constable it has an awesome reality and consistency."
It is that utter fidelity to what he saw that makes Constable a revolutionary artist. At the heart of his radicalism lay a dedication to painting in the open air. The tiny open-air oil sketches now recognised as his most brilliant creations have no big stories to tell; they are direct apprehensions of shadows moving across a meadow, rainclouds massing over a farm, people walking on a beach. Here perhaps is the true beginning of impressionism, realism – the modern eye.
By contrast, Evans says, Turner rarely painted outdoors and portrayed places without real specificity. "Although Turner travels everywhere, it's no coincidence that his watercolours of one German city have been identified as a different German city."
Yet Blayney Brown disputes that Constable is always less woozy than Turner. "Turner was a bombastical showoff but isn't there a place for bombastical showoffs? You can say the same thing about Constable's 'six-footers' [the big RA canvases]. All those leaping horses … all that nervous, scrabbly brushwork."
The real miracle is that Constable and Turner each existed, that British painting suddenly jumped to the forefront of European art in their lifetime. After them, it soon sank back into Victorian stodge. Did their rivalry drive them to reach so high?
There's no question Constable was in awe of Turner and fascinated by him. In fact, it was Constable who most perfectly described what made Turner so great, and what gave the cockney rebel the edge.
One night in 1813 they had dinner together at the Royal Academy. "I was a good deal entertained with Turner," wrote Constable afterwards. "He has a wonderful range of mind."
Exactly. In Turner's paintings we don't just see our own country, or one time. His art is a dizzying imaginative journey through ancient empires and swirling seas, Greek mythology, Napoleon and the steam age. Turner's spaces, defined by light and swooned by feeling, fascinated the abstract painters Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly. Constable was Freud's hero.
Choosing between them is like choosing between two visions of art: the realist versus the abstract. When people ask him if he prefers Constable to Turner, Evans throws the question back: "My answer would be, do you prefer Mark Rothko to Lucian Freud?"
Turner v Constable
Pedigree
Constable was the son of a well-to-do middle-class mill owner and Suffolk corn merchant, while Turner was a self-made success, born above a Covent Garden barber's shop.
And while Constable was well-dressed and renowned for his good looks, Turner was famously ugly, labelled "uncouth" by his contemporaries.
Love life
Constable was a respectable married man, while the promiscuous Turner was a outspoken critic of wedlock. "I hate all married men," he was once reported to have said, apparently a dig at Constable.
Rivalry
While Constable publicly praised his rival, in private he criticised his work as being "just steam and light". It didn't seem to do much to dent Turner's confidence. "I am the great lion of the day," he proclaimed.
Admirers
Ruskin said Turner while being a "hating humbug of all sorts" was "the painter and poet of the day". But Lucian Freud insisted Constable was the greater painter.
"You can admire Turner enormously, but never be moved by him really," he said. "For me, Constable is so much more moving than Turner because you feel, for him, it's truth-telling."
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