Writers: David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky
Director: David Bickerstaff
Featuring the masters of the English landscape, it’s no surprise that Tate Britain named their current exhibition on Turner and Constable, “Rivals and Originals”. Even with broad similarities in their chosen genre, Turner has been depicted as a ground-breaking radical, exploring new techniques. Constable has been viewed as an artist more rooted in convention. His traditional landscapes, regularly painted in his beloved Suffolk, have been read as ‘safe’ and homely, compared to Turner’s swirling maelstrom clouds. In terms of artistic reputation, it could be argued that the rebel has won the race.
In their new documentary, Turner & Constable, Exhibition on Screen joins forces with Tate Britain to examine how true this perception really is. We go back to basics: it is intriguing to learn that Turner and Constable are almost exact contemporaries, born within a year of each other. While Turner, born in the bustle and grind of Covent Garden, experienced a meteoric (and early) rise to become a member of the Royal Academy, Constable lived a comfortable but rural life, choosing to come to London once his skills were fully formed.
Breaking down both artists’ techniques, the film reveals Turner to be an early proponent of new paint colours (cobalt blue and chrome yellow), and Constable is reframed not as a follower, but a leader in his own right. Choosing to paint en plein air, his commitment to capturing movement and changes of light inspired the wave of Impressionists that came after him. When Constable’s landscapes were exhibited at the Louvre in 1802, his Hay Wain caused a sensation with the French art crowd. Even Delacroix rushed home afterwards to amend his painting.
Turner & Constable persuades us to re-consider the legacy of Turner and Constable, again examining their more unexpected aspects. Looking at their work in detail, artist Lachlan Goudie talks us through not only Turner’s oils, but crucially his range of watercolours. Both in sketchbooks and final draft, their luminosity demonstrates a subtlety and delicacy that we don’t associate with Turner’s more bombastic canvases.
It has often been said that Turner is all poetry, and Constable all truth. While Constable portrayed rural scenes as places of work as well as leisure, in their scale, there was a sense of the epic. Every location he painted, had an emotional resonance. Turner certainly wasn’t shy about giving us poetry, but the documentary leans more fully into his character: his sketchbooks depict a man of varied interests, including contemporary developments in maths and science.
With two such well-known artists as Turner and Constable, the challenge is always in finding a new angle. Although their work approaches the landscape very differently, it is in their innovations that we see them most clearly. Turner’s wild-weathered landscapes, portraying emotion rather than pinpoint accuracy; Constable’s loose, confident brush-work bringing a vivacity to the English landscape. Both artists were constantly evolving, and their work still deifies expectation. Turner & Constable makes a compelling case for seeing them not as enemies, but finally as equals.
Exhibition on Screen: Turner & Constable is in cinemas nationwide from 10 March.
