Nineteenth-century artists J.M.W. (Joseph Mallord William) Turner and John Constable were polar opposites, spending their careers at loggerheads.
Constable was a devoted family man and the father of seven children. Turner ignored two daughters he’d had out of wedlock, had mistresses and, following his death, was discovered to have led a double life.
“They were not chums,” Alexis Goodin said during a recent press reception at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute. “They were rivals, but at least Constable recognized that Turner had a gift.”
Goodin, a curatorial research associate, assembled an exhibit of more than 50 oils, watercolors and sketches by the two men, which continues through March 10.
Turner (1775 – 1851) and Constable (1776 – 1837) are the essential keystones to 19th-century British art. In middle life, Turner began the first significant abstractions of images, while Constable elevated the depiction of realistic landscapes to lofty artistry.
“It was a challenge, in some ways, to think of them anew,” Goodin said of the paintings. The curator is also the author of the show’s companion catalogue, “Turner and Constable at the Clark.” She explained that the exhibit’s purpose is to inform viewers of the social, political and cultural aspects of the painters’ times. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t yet in full bloom, however, London’s air, already clogged with coal smoke from chimneys, was becoming more fouled with new factories.
The promise of steady work, yet at often Dickensian wages, created a wave of migration from the country to the cities. Politically, England was striding toward representative democracy and the Reform Bill of 1832 was pivotal legislation.
Constable, however, was among the many who railed at the legislation, fearing that it placed government “into the hands of the rabble and the dregs of the people.”
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Napoleonic Wars raged on until 1802, placing a damper on recreational foreign travel. With England safely removed from all that noise, many of the painters chose to revel in the beauty of its quiet landscapes. When people are placed in those bucolic scenes, they’re referred to as “staffage.” If you look closely, particularly at a Constable painting not seen publicly for a period of some 150 years, you can determine a person’s class and what labor they’re involved in.
Goodin said she wanted “to try to tell a broader audience about what these figures are there for. I’m hoping that people will look in a new way at the old favorites.”
Many of these images derive from a 2007 gift, composed of some 300 oils, drawings and prints of British artists, from the private collection of the late Sir Edwin Manton.
In opening remarks, the institute’s director Olivier Meslay explained that the acquisition was “probably the most important since the (Sterling and Francine) Clark gift. It has been a transformative gift.”
The Clarks, founders of the institute, filled the galleries with their rare private collection, highlighted with the Impressionistic works of Matisse, Renoir and Monet. “Overnight,” Meslay said the Manton gift, valued at a reported $40 million in artwork, increased the institute’s standing. In America, there’s now a troika of important repositories of early British art — the Clark, Yale University and California’s Huntington Library.
J.M.W. Turner, the son of a barber, was raised in Covent Garden, London. When he was quite young, his deranged mother was committed to Bedlam (which now serves as a tourist attraction as the Imperial War Museum). Displaying an early interest in drawing, his father displayed his son’s work in his shop and they sold well. Turner entered London’s Royal Academy at age 14. By his mid-20s, he’d become a full member.
In time, Turner shook off his working class roots, yet always took pride in his Cockney accent and blunt manners. Considered the greatest British watercolorist of the 19th century, he lived well and a first floor room at his home served as a gallery. His father assisted him in mixing paint and in preparing canvasses.
Turner’s early work was extremely precise and representational of castle ruins, agricultural scenes and architecture. By mid-career, he more fully pursued abstraction, depicting the essence of an image, presaging the Impressionist Movement, which arrived some 40 years later.
In 1840 Turner painted “Rockets and Blue Lights…,” a fever dream of color describing a possible rescue of a foundering steamboat in a raging storm. Onshore white rockets blast skyward to warn of nearby shoals as one onlooker peers at the ship through a telescope.
“It’s almost a confusion of paint that really bothered his contemporaries,” Goodin said of the image. One critic suggested that the scene would be equally understandable if it was hung upside down.
Upon his death, he bequeathed some 20,000 artworks in various forms to the British nation. After his death, it was also discovered that, aside from his housemaid in London, he had another mistress in nearby Chelsea. Despite his eccentricities, he is much loved in England. There’s a Turner Society and recently his visage was to be found on the 20£ note.
John Constable, the son of a wealthy owner of several grain mills, was raised in rural Suffolk County as a country gentleman. He entered the Royal Academy in his mid-20s, yet didn’t become a full member until his mid-50s. It’s been suggested that Turner himself may have blocked his ascendancy.
Constable was used to waiting. Attempts to wed his true love, Maria Bicknell, were stonewalled by her relatives, horrified that her suitor was a painter. More than five years passed before their marriage. Their honeymoon in the village of Osmington is highlighted by two gallery paintings.
“I look at these paintings as (recording) the artist’s own delight,” Goodin said. “It’s an observed landscape of domestic contentment.”
Constable’s talent is to draw you into restful pictures, and his concentration was wholly upon the English landscape and its people.
Turner traveled widely through Europe, yet his rival never left Great Britain. When King Charles X of France awarded Constable with a gold medal for 1821’s “The Hay Wain,” the artist refused to travel to Paris.
The artist appeared to have a reverence for people and place. This is clear in “The Wheat Field” from 1815, a painting held privately for more than 150 years until it was shown publicly in 1991. Workers scythe and bundle the straw, while impoverished gleaners are allowed to pick up the remainders. The scene’s design is flawless and the sky underlines one of Constable’s obsessions. He filled numerous sketchbooks seemingly with every cumulous and cumulonimbus cloud he ever came across.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788), best known for his portraits (such as “The Blue Boy”), nevertheless was interested in landscape and was an influence upon Turner and Constable. There are 16 studies by the Englishman in the Manton building continuing through March 17.
Across the hall, through Feb. 24 are 19th-century images of “Extreme Nature.” They range from a vivid 1882 rendering of a meteor shower to an illustration of the great Boston fire of 1872. Many representations are dramatic enough to have doubtlessly given an earlier generation of Victorians the vapors.
“Turner and Constable” continues at the Clark through March 10. Galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20; children under age 18 and students with ID are admitted for free.
Don Stewart is a freelance writer who lives in Plainfield. He has written for the Greenfield Recorder since 1994.