Fire and Water, Sun and Sky

"Fire and water.... the one all heat, the other all humidity -- who will deny that they both exhibit, each in its own way, some of the highest qualities of Art?" That was the Literary Gazette's verdict in 1831 on JMW Turner and John Constable, probably the most admired of all British landscape artists. Almost exact contemporaries whose work is being celebrated at Tate Britain in Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals, a thoroughly engrossing exhibition that bathes you in the drama of Turner's golden sunlight, contrasted with perhaps the more understated charms of Constable's cloud-filled skies. 

"The Sun is God" are supposed to have been Turner's last words, and throughout this show you can't get away from his solar worship -- one striking watercolour records The Sun Rising over Water. And that's it, that's all there is, but to be frank, you don't really notice the water. It's the bright yellow Sun that holds your eye, pure and simple. And for our first image, let's have another sunrise, in a very late Turner, from almost the end, when his painting technique was growing ever more abstract.

Turner had first painted Norham Castle, overlooking the River Tweed on the border between England and Scotland, in his 20s. This final depiction, done from memory and presumably old sketches when he was around 70, is unfinished, though you wonder how much more he might have done to it. It's a view bathed in light, the Sun reflected in the river. And it makes you realise how astonishingly avant-garde Turner's art was for the early 19th century. 

Among the very first pictures you encounter are early portraits of the two artists -- a very confident Self-Portrait by Turner made when he was about 24 and a depiction of a rather shy-looking John Constable by fellow Royal Academy student Ramsay Richard Reinagle. They seem to express a lot: Turner the Wunderkind, a member of the RA at 27; Constable the slow starter, who found it difficult to sell his work, who wasn't elected to the Academy until he was in his 50s. Early on, you get the sense of Turner as a bit of a show-off, going for the grand effect in a painting of the Lake District, while even amid the lakes and fells, Constable's viewpoint is very understated. 

For Turner the Sun was the driving force, but for Constable, "the sky is the source of light in Nature, and governs everything." If Turner painted just the Sun, Constable spent hours studying just the clouds, and sketching them. Clouds waft over his pictures of what we regard as bucolic rural scenes, though life was by no means easy for those East Anglian country folk bringing in the harvest. 

Constable painted outdoors -- you can see his fold-up sketching chair in the show, and he managed to bring a remarkable freshness to these depictions. He is somehow the recorder of our memory of the English countryside. If you've ever been for a walk through farmland in the south, you've come to the gate in A Cornfield. 

While a lot of the exhibits here are from the Tate itself, a fair number of major paintings by both artists have made their way across the Atlantic from museums in the US. Among them Constable's The White Horse, the first he ever produced on a six-foot canvas, not the sort you could paint out in the open, but put together in the studio from a series of outdoor sketches.

Exhibited in 1819, it led to Constable becoming an associate member of the RA, fully 20 years later than Turner. 

A bit over halfway through this show -- and it's a big, big show -- there's a screen showing a clip on a loop from Mr Turner, the 2014 Mike Leigh film in which Timothy Spall played JMW. It recreates the incident at the RA in which Turner dramatically made a showy last-minute addition to a seascape hanging close to Constable's The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, adding a bright red splodge of paint. "He has been here and fired a gun," said Constable, who had found his own painting a bit of a slog. However theatrical, the video nicely encapsulates the rivalry.  

Now, the Constables may be gorgeous, but it's really Mr Turner who fills you with wonder. Just look at this steamer in a snowstorm: It's almost as if you're gazing through a plate-glass window on the seafront (at the Turner Contemporary in Margate perhaps), watching agog as the ship tries to battle its way into the safety of the harbour.  

The violence, the vibrancy of the brushstrokes is incredible. It's a whirl of paint; this is the picture for which Turner is supposed to have been lashed to a ship's mast so he could observe the storm. 

And then this, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons in 1834. It's one of a number of images of Turner's that seem to emphasise the passing of an old order and the advent of a new age, full of symbolism. Did Turner exaggerate the extent of the flames? Maybe. But that only serves to heighten the drama. 

Let's have another Turner, perhaps with a similar sentiment from around the same era, with the moon illuminating the work of men transhipping coal from barges to larger ships on the River Tyne at Newcastle.... their work too would soon become an activity of the past with the arrival of the railways. 

But for our last picture, let's go back to Constable Country, the border of Suffolk and Essex and Stoke-by-Nayland.

"What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower during the night," Constable wrote to a friend in 1835. Such a picture would include "plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey.... all good paintable material."  

This was Constable's last six-foot sketch; he never worked it up for exhibition, dying in 1837, more than a decade before Turner. It is still bucolic rural England. 

Despite the size of this show, not all the painters' greatest hits are on display: Constable's The Hay Wain and Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire have stayed in the National Gallery, but if you want to go and see those, it's just half an hour's walk from Tate Britain and you can pop in for free any day. It's a bit early to be handing out awards for 2026 -- this is literally the first exhibition we've been to this year -- but Turner & Constable is likely to be near the top of the list when we look back in December.

Practicalities

Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals is on at Tate Britain until April 12 and is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost £24, and it's a good idea to book online, which you can do here; it was extremely crowded when we visited on a Tuesday afternoon. We spent a good 2 1/2 hours in this show. The nearest London Underground station to Tate Britain is Pimlico on the Victoria Line, about five minutes walk away.

Images

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Norham Castle, Sunrise, c. 1845, Tate. Image: Tate, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

John Constable (1776-1837), The Wheatfield, exhibited 1816, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
John Constable, The White Horse, 1819. © The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr
JMW Turner, Snow Storm -- Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, exhibited 1842, Tate. Image: Tate, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

JMW Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, exhibited 1835, Cleveland Museum of Art
JMW Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, exhibited 1835, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
John Constable, Stoke-by-Nayland, c. 1835-37, The Art Institute of Chicago