Acclaimed giants of the English landscape
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Two titans of landscape painting who faced off as rivals in 18th-century Britain go head-to-head at Tate Britain in an exhibition celebrating 250 years since their births. Radically different painters with unique personalities and upbringings, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable reacted to the world around them with an originality that influenced the birth of modernism. Turner, an ambitious young star who employed expressive color and radiant light to capture the raw power of nature, studied and sketched on his travels across Britain and Europe. Rome was a constant touchstone throughout his career, exemplified in the luminous “Ancient Italy — Ovid Banished From Rome,” exhibited 1838, with its glowing sunset rendered in his signature shades of yellow. Constable, brought up in a prosperous family, sought poignant and truthful depictions of the Suffolk landscapes of his childhood, worked “en plein air” (outdoors) in oil to capture its fleeting atmospheres. His dramatic, cloud-swept skies are among his greatest achievements, represented here by an ambitious group of studies. Seen side-by-side, as the artists themselves often chose to exhibit, “Turner and Constable” offers an opportunity to examine the intertwined talents of two pivotal British artists.
J.M.W. Turner, “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834,” 1835, Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of John L. Severance 1942.647
