Artist in Focus - Turner & Constable

2025 will see a major exhibition opening at Tate Britain that will celebrate 250 years since the birth of two iconic British landscape artists and rivals. J.M.W. Turner was a child prodigy from a poorer family who died with 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours and 30,000 works on paper and achieved great success in his lifetime. Although John Constable came from a wealthier mercantile family, his works were more popular in France and he was, in general, slower than his rival to achieve his success. Constable entered the Royal Academy ten years later than Turner, due to his later commitment to becoming an artist and the slower development of his style. Constable became a full member of the Royal Academy at 52, almost double the age of when Turner achieved the same at only 27. Despite their differences they nonetheless were both key to moving forward Romanticism, which emphasised an emotional response to nature.

Where Turner used sketches and his imagination to depict scenes from his travels in his studio, achieving expressive colouring and creating turbulent marine paintings and fiery sunsets using glazes, Constable painted close-to-home countryside landscapes inspired by places he loved. More famed for docile and peaceful cloud sketches, Constable often painted outdoors and in thick oils. Their rivalry supposedly came to a peak when they were displayed next to each other in the Summer Exhibition of 1832, where Turner allegedly added a bright red buoy to his painting only after seeing Constable’s, to draw attention away from his rival and to his own work, much to the shock and chagrin of Constable. Turner was memorialised on a UK bank note and Constable in the UK passport so it is clear that, despite their rivalry, differing success and differing upbringings during their lifetime, they are held in the highest esteem and have left a lasting impact on the British art world.