Art of war! Two paintings that sparked famous feud between British masters Turner and Constable are set to go on display together for first time since 1832
- John Constable’s The Opening Of Waterloo and Helvoetsluys by JMW Turner have been reunited once again
- In 1832, Turner vandalised Constable’s canvas after becoming worried it would overshadow his piece
- It sparked famous feud, which was immortalised on screen in Mike Leigh’s Oscar-nominated film Mr Turner
Two paintings which sparked a famous feud between two revolutionary British artists are going on display at the Royal Academy together for the first time since 1832.
John Constable’s The Opening Of Waterloo and Helvoetsluys by JMW Turner are being hung up across from one another in the exhibition – 187 years after the painters’ rivalry reached boiling point.
During the Summer Exhibition of 1832, the two of the giants of British painting found that their paintings had been pinned up side-by-side in one of the main galleries.
After seeing Constable’s piece – which he’d been working on for 15 years – Turner became worried that his Dutch seascape would be overshadowed.
John Constable’s The Opening Of Waterloo is being hung up at the Royal Academy directly facing a canvas by the painter’s arch rival
Helvoetsluys, a Dutch seascape by JMW Turner, has been borrowed from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum for the free exhibition which runs until March
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Following several trips back and forth, Turner finally returned with his palette and, leaning close to the canvas, applied a small red buoy, no bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea. He left without saying a word, the paint still wet and glistening.
Constable told a fellow Academy member: ‘He has been here and fired a gun.’ What he meant, of course, was that this last-minute dash of elan — of sheer, breathtaking colour — was tantamount to an act of sabotage against his own painting hanging alongside.
The exhibition was a disaster for Constable. Even his friend the painter Thomas Stothard pronounced Waterloo Bridge: ‘Very unfinished, sir.’
It’s the first time the two paintings (facing each other at the gallery in London) have been in the same location since 1832 – when they sparked a bitter rivalry between the artists
Curator Per Rumberg said the story helped create ‘the image of Turner as an impulsive genius’.
‘I think it became so famous because it epitomised the rivalry between Turner and Constable which we like to think of,’ he told the Evening Standard. ‘We know both pictures were shown in 1832 and they did hang next to each other.
‘However, the whole story that became so famous wasn’t recorded at the time but 30 years later by Charles Robert Leslie, a fellow academician, who said he had been in the room 30 years earlier.
‘It’s largely about Turner and his impulsiveness and of course both artists were dead at that point, but by 1860 had become the stuff of legend already.’
The special display at the Royal Academy is free and runs from tomorrow until March 31. It’s part of the 250th anniversary of the RA Schools.
Both paintings are on loan from their respective homes. Helvoetsluys has been borrowed from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, while the Constable is on loan from Tate Britain.
They’ve been hung up across from each other ‘deliberately’ because they’re so different.
Mr Rumberg added: ‘You can look at them individually or step back and look at them together. We are not saying one is better than the other but leaving it open to the visitor.’
Turner and Constable were opposites in birth, looks and temperament.
Painters at war: Revolutionary artists Joseph Mallord William Turner (left) and John Constable (right) were bitter rivals
Turner, born in Covent Garden in 1775 to a father who had a wig-trimming and barber’s business, was a monomaniac who preferred his palette and brushes to the convivial company of the dinner table.
A Miss Dart, who knew Turner in his youth when he stayed with her uncle near Avon, disobligingly described him as ‘singular and silent . . . mean and ungrateful . . . careless and slovenly in his dress . . . anything but a nice-looking young man.’
It is an image captured so brilliantly by the actor Timothy Spall in a new film about the painter that he won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Turner cared little what others thought of him. When a fellow member of the Academy, Sir Francis Bourgeois, called him ‘a little reptile’, he replied coolly that he was ‘a great reptile — with ill manners’.
The Opening Of Waterloo took Constable 15 years to create. Constable said ‘He has been here and fired a gun’, after Turner vandalised it in 1832
He never married, but lived with his ageing father, who was always catching cold. Turner affectionately called him ‘Daddy’ even into middle-age.
Constable was a country lad. Born in 1776, he grew up in Suffolk, still known today as Constable Country. His father, an affluent miller, was keen his son should continue the family business rather than pursue the precarious living of a painter. While Turner was just 15 when he first exhibited at the Academy, Constable was nearly 40.
Unlike bachelor Turner, Constable was happily married to Maria Bicknell, the granddaughter of a Suffolk neighbour. He fervently believed his artistic success depended on her love. ‘All my hopes and prospects in life,’ he wrote to her, ‘are included in my attachment to you.’
They had seven children, and Constable’s friend and biographer C.R. Leslie recalled that the babies were as often in their father’s arms as their mother’s.
The paintings have been borrowed from museums and now face each other once again in the temporary gallery, which runs until March
What the rivals had in common was an astonishingly vivid new way of looking at landscape.
While artists of the previous generation had set out to paint the landscape with topographical accuracy, Turner and Constable wished to capture its spirit.
Turner painted tumultuous storms over harbours, blazing fires, the smoke and steam of the new industrial age. He thrilled to weather at its wildest and most violent.
This recklessness is evidenced in an account given by a Cornish newspaper editor of a boat trip with Turner off the coast of Plymouth. While the other passengers suffered crippling sea-sickness in the ‘boisterous’ waters, Turner sat in the stern muttering admiringly: ‘That’s fine! Fine!’
Constable was intensely interested in the quality of light: the way scudding clouds cast shadows over fields, the haze after a downpour, late afternoon sun on a riverbank. He proudly wrote of his delight in decay and neglect: ‘Old rotten banks, slimy posts and brickwork — I love such things.’
They might have found much to admire in each other’s work, but Turner saw Constable as a young pretender with an eye on his crown. To Constable, Turner was a king to be toppled.
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