Turner and Constable: art history’s favourite fake feud

Even in death, Turner and Constable can’t help running into each other. The perceived rivalry between Britain’s two greatest landscape painters has endured throughout the decades. A new show at Tate Britain – subtitled ‘Rivals & Originals’ – reinforces this narrative. In one corner, Constable: representing tradition, stability, Suffolk. In the other, Turner: representing progress, innovation, the sublime. Let’s have a clean  fight, lads! It’s a compelling story. It’s also not really true.

To be sure, Turner and Constable were two very different men. Turner was born in 1775 to a working-class barber in smoggy Covent Garden; Constable was born a year later into a prosperous household in the Suffolk countryside. Constable applied his precise, realistic style to depict his native county; Turner depicted historical and Biblical scenes with dreamlike vortexes. Turner was a restless Wunderluster; Constable never left Britain. In style and temperament, it’s easy to pit the two against each other.

What they had in common was talent and ambition: both elevated the landscape to the upper echelons of art. In their own lifetimes, critics stoked the perception of competition and animosity between the pair and by the time they were both well-known names within the Royal Academy, they were frequently compared to one another. Constable had “none of the poetry of Nature like Mr. Turner,” wrote the Examiner in 1819, “but he has more of her portraiture.” Constable’s works “present no stronger contrast” than with Turner’s, said the London Magazine in 1829. “The first is all truth, the last all poetry.” In 1831, the Literary Gazette likened them to “fire and water”.

Comparison, of course, has its uses. Their differences in style – Constable’s precision to Turner’s expressiveness – tell us something about artistic innovation in the 19th century. But for years, Turner and Constable have been locked in a rivalry not of their own making. This manufactured feud persists today. In 2014, a Daily Mail article on two separate Turner and Constable shows opening that year ran with the headline: “Why Britain’s two greatest painters hated each other’s guts.”

If the two men were enemies, the arena of conflict was the Royal Academy. “It was a competitive place,” Amy Concannon, curator of ‘Rivals & Originals’, told me. “Works hung side by side, floor to ceiling. You had to do things to make yours stand out in order to attract patrons or to make sales.” It wasn’t enough just to be included; once you went through the hurdle of getting your work accepted, there was still the matter of which room you’d be placed in, and whereabouts on the wall. Artists wanted their work in the ‘Great Room’ and ‘on the line’ – the prized spot on the centre of the wall, matching viewers’ eyelines. “It was tough being an artist then,” Concannon said. “It was a tough business like it is now. And so they were all rivals.”

There was competition between the two men, and they undoubtedly criticised each other’s work in private, but what was printed publicly shouldn’t be taken at face-value. “The art press at the time cooked up this idea of rivalry,” Concannon said. “There are a couple of occasions when the journalists circulated things that Turner said about Constable’s work that he might not have said.” She is referring to a comment supposedly made by Turner in 1829, where he likened Constable’s increasingly conspicuous highlights to “splashing from a white-washing ceiling”. The only known comment Turner ever made about Constable’s work was quoted differently by different outlets – and he may not have even said it at all. If he was in a rivalry with Constable, Turner didn’t seem to know about it. “The fact that the journalists repeated that through different publications makes me think that they just loved that idea of rivalry,” Concannon added. “Everyone loves a bit of gossip, don’t they?”

As usual, there’s more to the story than what the journalists tell us. In her book Turner & Constable: Art, Life, Landscape, Nicola Moorby argues that their rivalry was largely an invention by outside commentators. For Moorby, it’s better to think of Turner and Constable as comrades, two artists striving towards greatness in their respective styles. Moorby, now a curator at the Tate (though she didn’t curate Rivals & Originals), hopes people will approach the show with an open mind. “It wasn’t that the two of them were trying to necessarily defeat each other,” she told me. “They were rivals in the sense of really trying to broaden what landscape could do. And in this sense, it’s much more interesting if you put them side by side rather than face to face… you don’t need to pick one over the other.”

Artists, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, are human beings too. They are governed by the same natural laws as the rest of us, and there is nothing more natural than envy. For as long as people have written about art, they have written about feuds. Considered the world’s first work of art history, Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is filled with tales of petty jealousies, bruised egos, public smear campaigns – even murder. For Vasari, competition was necessary to advance artistic perfection, but he believed that envy was the enemy of the artist. “How blameworthy it is to find the vice of envy in a distinguished person, a vice no one should possess,” he wrote. “And what a wicked and horrible thing it is to seek, under the guise of false friendship, to extinguish in others not only their fame and glory but their very lives as well!”​ If you want real divas, look to the Renaissance.

In the more recent book The Art of Rivalry from 2017, Sebastian Smee contends that what separates modern artistic rivalry from earlier periods is the strive to be, above all, original. Rather than competing to master a tradition or style, Smee believes modern artists put their energies into being disruptive, provocative, shocking. He cites famous adversaries: Manet and Degas; Picasso and Matisse; Freud and Bacon; Pollock and de Kooning.

Why don’t we see overt rivalry between artists anymore? After all, there are more galleries, more artists, more exhibitions than ever before. Surely if there was a moment for creative competition, it’s now. But whilst art has not stopped, it has grown increasingly inward – conceptual, intelligent, and often alienating. Perhaps as a result, art is less of an occasion now; the shows that draw the crowds are usually retrospectives of artists who are already established and quite often dead. I’m reminded of Adam Gopnik’s remark that postmodern art is post-audience art.

Today’s artists aren’t celebrities. Ask a member of the public to name a living British artist and they will probably list off Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin- the Young British Artists (YBAs) who shot to fame 30 years ago and who aren’t so young anymore. We’re still producing brilliant artists, but they are no longer national treasures. Footballers and pop stars, yes; artists, no.

So much contemporary art focuses on reclaiming identity, and exists in a culture where more and more figures – artists, critics, cultural institutions – fear ‘cancellation’. It’s easier to not raise one’s head above the parapet. Tracey Emin made a few headlines last year when she said on Louis Theroux’s podcast that male artists, like her YBA contemporary Damien Hirst, peak in their 40s. It was a remark typical of Emin’s candour, but not exactly provocative. (And, considering the quality of Hirst’s recent output, can hardly be called unfair.) But in a cultural climate that is increasingly politicised – and with a media blood-hungry for any whiff of controversy – who can blame artists for wanting to keep quiet?

All of this is a long way from Constable and Turner and the 19th century. But their competition continues into the present. Turner is on our money, but Constable is in our passports. (They’ve both appeared on stamps, so I guess they cancel each other out there.) and based on different opinion polls, both are considered the ‘nation’s favourite artist’. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire topped Radio 4’s 2005 poll, with Constable’s The Hay Wain coming second. Constable’s Hay Wain beat Turner’s Temeraire in a 2022 survey, although the top place that year went to Banksy’s Girl with Balloon. (It says something that the only artist to achieve true celebrity status in Britain this century is anonymous.)

But the way we think about their rivalry, as with most artistic rivalries, is constructed. It’s a way for journalists to create a narrative out of nuance. It’s a way for historians to make sense of a complicated past. It’s a way for galleries to sell tickets. I asked Nicola Moorby if attaching the narrative of rivalry to artists is ever helpful. “Anything that gets people interested in art is a positive thing,” she replied. “But it can be quite reductive. And I think the idea of competition and rivalry can also be very, very complicated. It needn’t always be something that encourages us to pick a winner or a loser to the detriment of the other.”

“So, who did win?” I asked, bulldozing Moorby’s intelligent answer with a journalistic question. “Constable or Turner?”

She paused for a moment, either considering her answer or internally sighing at the banality of the question. “Well, we won in the end really,” she replied. “Because whether you choose Constable or Turner, they’ve still painted some of the most astonishing landscapes in the history of art. And the fact that there were two of them is to our benefit.”