Another fascinating insight into the lives of English artists – John Constable and JMW Turner by Barrie Sheppard. Barrie writes: John Constable was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1820. He was 44. It wasn’t until he was 53 in 1929 that he was admitted as an Academician. JMW Turner, on the other hand, was elected an Associate in 1799 when he was 24, and an Academician three years later in 1802 at age 27. What held Constable back?
Constable was a committed painter of landscapes local to his birthplace in the Suffolk village of Bergholt. His landscapes, however, were out of fashion at the time, romantic scenes of the ‘Sublime’ being preferred; and, furthermore, landscape painting was regarded an inferior genre to history painting. The prodigiously talented Turner, on the other hand, had a much broader range of subjects, including romantic landscapes and seascapes of the sublime, and perspective watercolour drawings of historic, ecclesiastical buildings.
Constable attempted to combat the disadvantage by painting large works to demonstrate that landscapes too could be treated monumentally in the way of history paintings, and that such works required degrees of skill comparable with those demanded of the favoured genre. Hence his series of so-called “six footers”, the most famous of which was, and still is, The Hay Wain.
He finally succeeded in gaining the notice required for admission to the Academy with his Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) of 1816 -17, and The White Horse of 1819, both large “six foot” works. The former depicts a barge on the River Stour about to be poled under a bridge, the unharnessed horse and its attendant waiting on the towpath; the latter depicts a horse being ferried across the river on a barge. A year later, in 1820, he was elected an Associate member of the Academy.
Full membership came seven years later following his successes with other “six footers”, including The Hay Wain, the painting that caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1822, and which was awarded a gold medal by King Louis XVIII.
Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Constable and the brilliant, aggressive and ill-mannered Turner clashed on varnish day at the Academy’s summer exhibition of 1832. Who could forget Mike Leigh’s re-creation of that meeting in his film, Mr Turner, when Timothy Spall’s “Turner” enters the Exhibition Room and daubs a blob of red paint on his seascape, Helvoetsluys the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea?
Next to Turner’s work is John Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge of 1832. Constable stands before it making the final touches when Turner looks disparagingly at him, abruptly leaves the room only to return later, and, with his brush laden with red paint, dabs the blob of red onto his grey sea. Academicians gasp as he stomps out of the room only to return later to wipe off the lower part of the daub with his finger to transform it into a buoy. Constable, furious, blurts out: “He has come here and fired a gun” and storms out of the room. The film sequence is authentic; it happened that way.
When I saw the film I thought that Turner was just bragging, showing off how he could transform his picture with a mere daub of paint, fingered with a deft touch to become a buoy – a painterly act in contrast to the slow, meticulous touching of Constable’s “finishing”.
But now, having looked at many of Constable’s pictures, I think there was more to it. In many of his compositions there is invariably a small touch of red to be seen somewhere. It may be a jacket, a cap, an item of harness on a horse, a small flash of light on the wall of a cottage. In all three versions of his The Lock, for example, in both the oil sketches and finished works, the lockkeeper’s jacket is vivid red, a touch that enlivens the pictures. And there is the red vest of the boy drinking from the stream in The Corn Field. It’s there also in his early The Church Porch, East Bergholt. And so on.
It is so common that it functions like a trademark, as it were. And it is always, or almost always, small, his The Opening of Waterloo Bridge being an exception. There the subject of the painting demands more red, for in the foreground are the royal barges – a pageant of numerous standards and figures in the red of ceremonial dress – all about to embark down-river to the bridge.
I suspect that when Turner added that daub of red paint to his seascape in front of Constable, he was not just showing off his prowess as a handler of paint, but was saying, as it were, “Anything you can do Mr. Constable I can do too”; and, perhaps, “have done better”, as, for example, in his dramatic Fishermen on a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather of 1802 when he was a young man just 27 years of age, and already an Academician of three years.
The seed of the confrontation was, in all probability, sown twelve months earlier at a dinner party given by a General Edmund Phipps, a retired, distinguished soldier and former MP. Both Turner and Constable were present, along with a number of other Academicians, including David Roberts, who recorded an extraordinary exchange that took place between Constable and Turner. According to Roberts, Constable was expostulating on “the severe duties he had undergone in the hanging of the Exhibition” of 1831, having discharged his “Sacred Duties”… “disinterestedly”. (Roberts thought Constable “conceited and egotistical”). After the hanging had been arranged, Constable had moved a picture of Turner’s at the last minute to another less advantageous place in the room. At the dinner party, Turner, not known for his good manners, “opened like a ferret” on Constable about the change. His target squirmed and came up with the lame explanation that he had moved Turner’s picture to a place of better lighting; whereupon Turner shot back with the question as to why, then, had he placed a work of his own in the vacated space. Constable, according to Roberts, reacted like “a criminal detected in his crime”.
Such could be an acrid exchange between two great English artists of the 19th century.