Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby
Yale University Press, 2025
Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable, two of the best-known painters in the history of English art, were contemporaries who circled each other warily throughout their artistic careers. In her new book Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape, Nicola Moorby rises admirably to the challenge of telling the fascinating story of their relationship, not only providing a vivid portrait of each protagonist, but also skilfully delineating the social and artistic milieu in which they operated.
A long-standing view holds that each artist was the antithesis of the other. Turner was a painter of tumultuously colourful landscapes, often referencing historical or mythical events, although in his later work he could also verge on abstraction avant la lettre. In contrast, Constable evoked a vision of the English countryside which was firmly embedded in the Suffolk of his birth, whilst displaying a painterly acuity and vision that proved to be a significant influence on the French Impressionists. Although these stereotypes remain more or less true, there was, as Moorby shows, much more to both artists than that.
They were born just fourteen months apart (Turner in April 1775 and Constable in June 1776) and yet their career paths reveal Turner as by far the more established artist, with the junior Constable forging a new path. Turner was a recognised prodigy from early in his career who went on to achieve the kind of fame of which he could never have dreamt in his early years, as the son of a barber and a wig-maker. Such were his artistic gifts that Turner entered the Royal Academy in 1789, aged fourteen. In contrast, Constable seems to have had a much different trajectory: instead of infiltrating the London art world as a teenager, he developed his artistic sensibilities via sketching trips in the Suffolk and Essex countryside.
What comes across very clearly in Moorby’s book is how crucial it was for any aspiring artist to gain recognition from the RA, and promotion through its ranks, in order to make a name for himself. Turner, by all accounts, was a gruff, closed book of a man, deeply suspicious, as well as rough-and-ready if need be. Constable was a much more affable chap, devoted to his wife and children. However, these descriptions only skim the surface of each man’s character, which derived from his respective upbringing: Turner’s childhood in the hurly-burly of Georgian London was a far cry from Constable’s early life in picturesque East Bergholt, the village in rural East Anglia where his father owned a prosperous flour-milling business. If Turner sought to transcend his roots through his art, Constable embraced his childhood landscape as a source of continual inspiration.
By the time Constable arrived in London in 1799 hoping to gain admittance to the RA, Turner was already making a name for himself. As students both of them would have been obliged to undertake the same practical syllabus and to adhere to the tenets of art as articulated by the RA’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his series of lectures known as the Discourses. Both would also have aspired to feature prominently in the annual RA exhibition, which regularly attracted a cultivated crowd of thousands – and, indeed, in later years each of them would go on to dominate this event with their latest productions.
Before then they had to forge their reputations. In 1790 Turner was one of the youngest artists to ever have a work accepted for the RA exhibition, with his watercolour entitled The Archbishop’s Palace in London, and by 1794 he was receiving regular notices of his work in the contemporary press. Although he was always a shrewd financial operator, Turner’s main ambition seems to have been to boost his status by neglecting watercolour in favour of expansive, dramatic oil paintings, which were better suited to display on the RA’s walls. By 1799, this work led to Turner’s election as an Associate of the RA, the preliminary stage to becoming a full Academician.
However, as Moorby points out, the idea that Constable was a late starter in comparison isn’t true. Indeed, Constable’s progress in the Schools was actually remarkably rapid, to the point where he overtook Turner when progressing from the Antique Academy into the Life Class due to his exceptional draughtsmanship. Having finished their RA educations, the two artists then adopted strikingly different specialisms in terms of the landscapes that they portrayed. Whilst Constable would return repeatedly to East Bergholt with its quintessentially English pastoral attractions, Turner set off for the artistic wonders of mainland Europe, where he gorged on the contents of the Louvre and witnessed the grandeur of the Swiss and French Alps. It was during this period that the first critical comment by either of them was recorded: Constable remarked that he did not think Turner’s art “true to nature” and felt that it was, at times, “so ambiguous as to be scarcely intelligible.”
As an intriguing supplement to this comparative account of Turner and Constable’s professional careers, Moorby devotes some space to their respective private lives. In effect, Turner was a fiercely guarded individual, whilst Constable’s family relationships are much more transparent. The numerous sketchbooks that Turner left behind provide much autobiographical detail, while Constable’s many surviving letters make us, as Moorby puts it, “privy to Constable’s inner world whereas Turner’s is more reliant on conjecture and anecdote.” What is known is that Turner had a series of relationships with a select group of women who seem to have been devoted to him but who would otherwise have been lost to history due to their class status, and that, along the way, children were born of these liaisons. By contrast, for Constable, Maria Bicknell —also from East Bergholt, whom he first met in 1800 and married in 1816— would remain the one, constant love of his life. Maria died of tuberculosis at forty-one, a few months after giving birth to their seventh child. Before then the two seem to have been totally dedicated to each other, and Maria’s death would form the defining tragedy of Constable’s life.
Although each artist was long known to the other as a result of their respective RA endeavours, it was only in June 1813 that the two men finally came face to face, at the King’s annual birthday dinner held solely for artists. The seating plan shows that they were seated next to each other. Writing to Maria, Constable recalled how “I was a good deal entertained by Turner. I always expected to find him what I did – he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.” Unfortunately, it is not known what Turner made of Constable at this event. As it was, the former remained one of the pre-eminent members of the RA whilst the latter continued to be an eager —if at this point frustrated— aspirant to the rank of Associate.
With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Europe was opened up to English visitors from all walks of life who flocked to see its scenic and cultural landmarks. Turner’s love of travel, which had seen him traverse the length and breadth of Britain in order to capture his pictorial subjects in different media, now made him an avid Continental tourist. He seemed to be always on the go, travelling from one location to another. His stamina and gift for planning often complicated itineraries seem to have been phenomenal. As Moorby notes, the distances that he covered were staggering: from 1817 to 1845 he ranged from Copenhagen in the north to Paestum in southern Italy and from the northwestern tip of France to Vienna, all of which inspired “a frenzy of locational sketching,” as can be seen in the many notebooks that remain. In contrast, Constable stayed firmly put in the country of his birth. Just as Turner was setting off on his epic pan-European tour, Constable moved his family to London as a base from which to venture out and produce some of his best-known works, such as The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, both examples of the “six-footer” canvases which he produced for the RA exhibitions and which demonstrate the grandeur of his vision, while incorporating echoes of the Old Masters. Although on home ground Constable’s brushwork met with criticism for its “spottiness,” in France the likes of Gericault and Delacroix marvelled at his technique, which was a sensation at the 1824 Salon. Even so, Constable remained adamant that he would never travel abroad, proclaiming “I hope not to go to Paris as long as I live. I would rather be a poor man here than a rich man abroad.”
By 1829 Constable had been elected as a full member of the RA. Just a few years later, in 1832, one of the most notorious encounters between himself and Turner would take place. Inevitably, the context was that year’s RA exhibition. As part of the lead-up to the show itself, an event known as Varnishing Day was traditionally held in which artists could come and put the finishing touches to any of their works ahead of the public’s admittance. Turner seems to have relished Varnishing Day and could often be found making minuscule adjustments to his exhibition works as a kind of theatrical performance. In this particular year his painting Helvoetsluys; the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea had been placed directly next to Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Waterloo Bridge, from Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’). Just before the opening Turner came in several times, standing behind Constable, who was perfecting his work. Turner looked from one painting to the other and finally slapped a daub of red paint, slightly bigger than a coin, on his grey sea, and then went away without saying a word. The flash of intense red against the cool tones caused a sensation. Constable came into the room just after Turner had left. “He has been here,” said Constable, “and fired a gun.” For Moorby, rather than an act of subtle aggression on Turner’s part, as it has usually been portrayed, this was an instance of artistic badinage in the bantering spirit that often enlivened Varnishing Day. In any case, this incident does not seem to have diminished Constable’s admiration for his competitor; of one now unidentified work of Turner’s, he said that it was “the most complete work of genius I ever saw.”
By the 1830s both men had established themselves as lecturers: Turner as professor of perspective at the RA, and Constable at the Royal Institute. In addition, Constable relieved Turner in rotation as a Visitor, a teaching role undertaken by Academicians, taking his last life class on the 25th of March 1837. Then, much to widespread shock amongst colleagues and public alike, Constable died just a few days later in the early hours of the 31st, apparently from heart failure. Turner would go on to outlive Constable by fourteen years, in that time producing some of his best-known and most innovative works such as The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, not to mention Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, depicting the full effect of what he somewhat dubiously claimed to have been a stint strapped to the mast of a Harwich steam vessel in the midst of a raging storm. By the time that this was painted in 1842, Turner had gained a lifelong champion of his work in the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Such was Ruskin’s reputation that Turner’s iconic status was assured throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Meanwhile Turner lived out his final years in domestic contentment as the so-called ‘husband’ of Sophia Booth, a matronly widow who settled with the artist in a cottage in Chelsea. During this period he habitually wore a naval greatcoat and was known as “Puggy Booth” or “The Admiral” in the local area. The end came for Turner in December 1851 after a long period of illness, his reported last words being “the Sun is God.” Unlike Constable, whose final resting place is his local church, St John’s in Hampstead, Turner was interred in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Artistic and personal differences aside, Turner and Constable’s combined influence on European art, both in their lifetimes and afterwards, remains incalculable. Theirs was a compellingly polarised dynamic which this book chronicles with an authoritative and engaging depth of erudition. Each, in their own way, made a massive contribution to England’s artistic heritage.--Mark Jones
