The odd couple

Frank Auerbach was right: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” J. M. W. Turner appears to have seen the world from midair: as viewers of his paintings, we can feel suspended in vortices of swirling wind, snow or smoke. John Constable, by contrast, has his feet firmly planted in the dirt. The mulch and turf in his work seems smelt and touched, as though experienced from the vantage of a mole. Get close to these artists’ works and this difference of orientation feels true. As Nicola Moorby points out in her gripping joint biography of the artists, it’s a comparison so entwined with their respective careers that even Constable’s obituary in The Spectator (1837) described him as “the very opposite of Turner”.

As with Matisse and Picasso, Gauguin and van Gogh or Michelangelo and Raphael, Turner and Constable’s odd-couple pairing is a familiar trope in art history. After all, the business of making art doesn’t lend itself naturally to dramatic re-enactment, so professional competition tends to get spun into heated rivalry, with artists engaged in largely unconvincing one-upmanship. Moorby’s book shows that it’s a framing that especially fails to apply in this case: Turner and Constable’s relationship might be better understood in collegiate, even fraternal terms. Yet her approach, which allows each artist’s work to be illuminated in terms of the other, provides a way of addressing what really matters in any artist’s life story: the work they leave behind.

As in a fairy tale, the lives of Turner and Constable can be presented flatly, as a parade of opposites. Turner, the working-class prodigy, son of a Covent Garden barber, born in smog-choked Maiden Lane; Constable, the upper-middle-class country boy, raised in a three-storey house in rural Suffolk. The former fiery, secretive, uncouth; the latter modest, gentle, charming. (The film casts itself). Born a year apart from each other, the two men crossed paths at the Royal Academy in London, at that time the only art school in the country. Equally significantly, it was the site of the annual Exhibition, in which both painters would debut their latest work to both opprobrium and praise. It’s within the context of the RA that Moorby articulates the similarities of each man’s ambitions for his craft. Both were obsessed with the seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, whose Arcadian visions provided a precedent for their intentions to elevate the status of landscape painting. To that end, both artists produced publications that acted at once as manuals and as manifestos: Turner’s pretentiously titled Liber Studiorum, published between 1807 and 1819; and Constable’s contrastingly underwhelming (in name, at least) English Landscape Scenery, published between 1830 and 1832. In a lecture at the Royal Institution just after its publication, Constable even claimed painting as a science, a “branch of natural philosophy of which pictures are but the experiments”. Really?

Anyone visiting “Constable country” in Suffolk might question the truth of that. The real Flatford Mill, subject of the artist’s best-known canvas, “The Hay Wain” (1821), has become, in Moorby’s tart phrasing, “an immersive alternative” to that work. But it’s the painting’s distance from that reality, rather than its fidelity to it, that compels. Painted in a studio far from the place it depicts, the canvas glitters with the textures of what the artist called “Willows, old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork”. It’s an act not of observation but of memory, triggered by the imagined smells and surfaces of a place he knew well. Turner’s work, too, evades easy description, toying as it does with concepts of finish that were hotly debated at the time. As Moorby notes, it’s thanks to subsequent artistic innovations such as impressionism and abstract expressionism that modern audiences are even ready to accept a painting as minimally inflected as “Norham Castle, Sunrise” (c.1845). And in 1935, when the National Gallery purchased a full-scale Constable sketch, believing it to be a finished canvas, the loose, expressive work was embraced by audiences schooled in modern art. What raised heckles then makes sense now.

The strangeness of each artist’s practice is reflected in the biographical research that Moorby plaits together. A paucity of correspondence leaves Turner mysterious. His relationship with his mother, whose mental illness had her sent to Bethlem Hospital (aka “Bedlam”) in Moorfields when the artist was in his mid-twenties, is an absence in his story. Largely missing, too, are the voices of Turner’s lovers Elizabeth White and Sophia Booth, a silence made louder by the sheer volume of letters to and from Constable, who seems to have lived inside a Georgian costume drama. (“How I do dislike pictures, I cannot bear the sight of them”, joshed his soon-to-be wife Maria Bicknell, easily the most likeable character in the book.) Further contrasts emerge as Moorby traces the geographical scope of each artist’s career. By contrast with Turner’s extensive travels – to Geneva, Rome, Venice, Paris, Copenhagen, Vienna – Constable’s decision to restrict the subjects of his most important paintings not only to England, but to the few square miles in which he grew up, looks eccentric. “The Hay Wain” was shown in Paris in 1824, where it was praised by painters such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, and resulted in Constable being awarded a gold medal to be presented by King Charles X. “I hope not to go to Paris as long as I live”, was the artist’s bolshie response. He never did.

In an exhilarating final chapter that traces the cultural afterlives of Turner and Constable, Nicola Moorby shows how their works have been entangled with shifting concepts of Englishness, from James Bond to Ukip. Two hundred and fifty years after Turner’s birth, this book provides an opportunity to reflect on how art’s openness allows it to stand for many things at once. Regardless, for both artists, the medium of painting was able uniquely to register the feeling of being in a world that was melting into air before their eyes. That’s why they matter, now more than ever.

Ben Street is an art historian and author based in London

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