on Constable and Turner

Constable and Turner (Tate Gallery, until 12 April);

I arrived at the Tate Britain by Thames Clipper (steely winter sunlight on Turner’s brilliant river) with a copy of Susan Owens’s extraordinary book Constable’s Year in my satchel. For years I had been intensely aware of Turner, not least by way of reading Ruskin, and had barely thought of Constable at all. I had some dim sense of sepia photogravures of The Hay Wain in clumsy varnished frames, clustering in those far corners of antique shops populated by the sorrowful, unwanted things. Which is wholly reprehensible in someone professing to care very much about place in writing and painting. I seem to have accepted a consensus without thinking: Turner is the innovator and the forerunner of the Impressionists; Constable painted safe ‘six-footer’ English summer landscapes in which the sun seemed always to have just vanished behind a cloud. I had a shaft of doubt about him five years ago visiting the Red House at Aldeburgh, and seeing a little oil sketch of a cornfield, a hedgerow, a rainy sky, which had belonged to Peter Pears – a view which I found as moving, strange and memorable as any of John Sell Cotman’s East Anglian backwaters.  

Susan Owens’s revelatory book has changed all that for me: Constable’s oil sketches have suddenly become vividly present, and I don’t know how I saw them without seeing them for so many years. When I was writing so much about evenings and passing lights and weathers, if only I had known Constable’s magical 1811 East Bergholt Fair with the dotted lights of ...