The art of war!
187 years on, Turner and Constable’s bitter rivalry renewed
JMW TuRNeR might very well be turning in his grave today as these two paintings are hung together at the Royal Academy for the first time in 187 years.
John Constable would probably not be very happy either, for when the pictures originally went up side by side at the Academy’s Summer exhibition in 1832, a bitter row between the two erupted.
Constable was showing off his vivid 7ft-long River Thames scene The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, on which he had worked for nearly 15 years.
Beside it was Turner’s smaller and distinctly more cool-toned seascape Helvoetsluys, featuring Dutch ships in a gale. Artists were allowed, on what was called ‘varnishing day’, to make finishing touches to their paintings before the exhibition opened to the public.
And Turner, after seeing his rival’s work, is said to have painted a single daub of red in the grey sea of his own canvas, returning a couple of days later to turn it into a buoy in the harbour.
After seeing the alteration, Constable reportedly told a fellow Academy member: ‘He has been here and fired a gun.’ The barbed comment suggests Constable believed his painting had been undermined by Turner’s inspired late addition of an impromptu splash of colour.
The feud between the two artists, both pioneers of a revolutionary style of landscape painting, was first recorded 28 years later in the autobiography of another painter, Charles Robert Leslie, who claimed to have been in the same room at the time.
It was later immortalised in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall.
Now the two oil paintings have been reunited at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. But on this occasion they will be hung opposite each other at a new, free exhibition opening today.
According to Leslie’s autobiography, which is included in the display, Turner’s painting was ‘beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it’ until he added the red. Constable’s, on the other hand, ‘seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver’.
But after Turner added his ‘round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling’, its intensity ‘caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak’.
Critics of the day preferred Turner’s work too. In the Morning Herald, one wrote of The Opening of Waterloo Bridge: ‘What a piece of plaster it is! Mr Constable appears to think he is a Turner.’
The new exhibition’s curator Per Rumberg said yesterday: ‘The two paintings…were never meant to upstage each other and that’s why we’re not hanging them next to each other.
‘You can look at them individually or step back and look at them together. We’re not saying one is better than the other but leaving it open to the visitor.’
He added: ‘As the two most naturally gifted artists of their generation who were of very similar age, of course there would have been rivalry between them. But the famous story of what happened at the Royal Academy in 1832…has come to epitomise the rivalry between Turner and Constable which we like to think of, and has helped to create the image of Turner as an impulsive genius.’
The Turner painting has been borrowed from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, while the Constable is on loan from Tate Britain, which showed them together in 2009. The new exhibition ends on March 31.
‘We’re not saying one is better’