Friday 13th March
I was going to feature this exhibition in last week's blog but ended up omitting it. It is not new and has been on since November last year and runs until April. I am personally gutted that I haven't found the time to get to see it. If Tom still lived in London I probably would have. Having not included it in last week's blog it was a strange coincidence that our friends Andrew and Sue, avid readers of my blog, actually went to see it last week. Fortunately, there is a film/video that accompanies it which I will get to watch.
This review is an amalgamation of several I've read from various sources.
The Sublime Clash of Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals
The landmark exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals, currently showing at Tate Britain , marks the 250th anniversary of the births of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). This sweeping retrospective, featuring over 170 works, succeeds in its ambitious goal: to dismantle the reductive "fire vs. water" clichés of the 19th-century press and reveal two complex, often complementary masters who shared a radical drive to elevate landscape painting.
The Architecture of a Rivalry
The exhibition is structured largely chronologically across 12 rooms, beginning with portraits of the two men in their early twenties. From the outset, the curators highlight the starkly different trajectories of their careers: Turner, the precocious "city boy" and son of a barber, who was elected a Royal Academician by 27; and Constable, the wealthier but slower-to-bloom rural artist who waited until his fifties for the same recognition.
The heart of the exhibition, however, lies in its "mischievous" side-by-side pairings. The most celebrated moment of their friction—the 1832 Royal Academy standoff—is vividly recounted. Visitors can see Constable’s massive The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, which Turner famously "sabotaged" by adding a single, brilliant red daub of paint to his own nearby work, Helvoetsluys, essentially "firing a gun" to steal the audience's attention.
Constable: The Precision of Feeling
Constable’s contributions are headlined by the return of The White Horse (1819) to London for the first time in two decades. These "six-footers" represent his stolid, meticulously observed "truth" of the English landscape. Yet, the show’s greatest revelation may be his small-scale oil sketches. Painted "on-the-go" outdoors, these works—such as his "skying" studies of clouds over Hampstead—show a surprisingly loose, almost impressionistic hand that rivals Turner in its modernity.
Turner: The Poetry of the Elements
If Constable is the artist of "humidity," Turner remains the master of "heat". His late works, particularly The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), dominate the galleries with their luminous oranges and yellows. The exhibition expertly tracks his evolution from polished topographies to the "tinted steam" of his final years, where form almost entirely dissolves into light and weather.
A Legacy of Equals
Rather than declaring a "winner," the exhibition concludes with a compelling argument for their shared legacy. In the final rooms, works like Turner’s nearly abstract Norham Castle and Constable’s late, melancholic Stoke-by-Nayland demonstrate that both artists eventually reached a similar frontier of artistic freedom.
Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals is a definitive, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the dialogue between two titans who changed the face of British art. It is essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand how the "fire" of one and the "water" of the other eventually merged into the modern landscape tradition.
Practical Information:
Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.
Dates: Until 12 April 2026.
Tickets: From £24; Free for Tate Members.
I've been treading water a bit lately with the holiday approaching but I really can't do anything more re: holiday so I took the opportunity to do some paintings for Jane Adams in Cornwall.
A while ago I had bought some cradelled wooden panels. This was something new for me. The "cradelled panel" consists of a rigid wooden front panel usually birch, basswood or mdf mounted on a wooden frame (the cradel) on the back. It provides a solid rigid surface to paint on which doesn't have any give in it and doesn't warp. Some have a very thin veneer attached to the painting surface. The panels are naturally very absorbant and need to be primed with acrylic primmer or gesso before paint is applied. I had tested the water with 8 small panels only 15cm x15cm square and 2 larger panels 30cm x 30cm square. The boards were mounted on a basswood cradel which I intended to leave natural wood so I first taped up the edges. The Jane Adams Gallery is in St Just in Penwith and she likes to have local scenes so I painted various views of Cape Cornwall, The Brissons and Pendeen Lighthouse. I used acrylics as I find painting very small in oils difficult. I managed to do all 10 on Tuesday and Wednesday and I will varnish them and send them off to her after the holiday. She was the only gallery with no new work and so it will be good to get her some before "the tourist season" starts at Easter.
For the next 2 weeks my blogs will hopefully be from The Caribbean! It may depend on when and how I can send them when Ive sorted what I can and can't do on my phone without incurring charges. My painting kit is packed and my holiday "sketches" will be using a whole different palette.