Turner vs Constable: is it time for art historians to choose?

Who was better, JMW Turner or John Constable? A daft question, surely, or so I thought. In my recent book on British art, I avoided choosing. Two greats, too different. But when The Times asked me to review Nicola Moorby’s new book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape (which is very good), I was invited to make a choice. “Show some ankle,” said the editor.

Should art historians choose? One of art history’s many self-denying ordinances is to avoid “value judgements”. These are regarded as subjective expressions of feeling. We are encouraged not to respond to aesthetic quality.

I think it’s time we grew out of this. Art history is not a science. Art is made to elicit a personal response. Artists evaluate each other all the time. Lucian Freud felt Constable’s “truth-telling about the land” made him “so much more moving than Turner”. I agree.

I believe, however, that if I were to poll readers of The Art Newspaper, most would go for Turner. Insofar as there was a rivalry between Constable and Turner, Turner wins hands-down today. He is on our banknotes, while Constable gets only a page in our passports. Nobody makes tea towels with The Hay Wain (1821) on any more, still less chocolate boxes (I’ve checked). The Tate, on its website, is emphatic: “Turner is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential British artist of all time.”

How did Turner come out on top? Today we celebrate his late works, but during his lifetime now-seminal works such as Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844) left many bewildered. “The Academy ought to throw a wet blanket over either this fire king or his works,” one critic said. Others spread rumours that Turner put hooks on his own frames, lest they be hung the wrong way up.

In fact, it was Turner’s more conventional work which won him swift election to the Royal Academy (at just 26) and a fortune. Patrons such as Sir Richard Colt Hoare liked Turner because his classicised landscapes hung well beside Hoare’s Claudes, in his Neo-Classical house, Stourhead, surrounded by its classically reshaped gardens.

Turner’s extraordinary achievement is that he was able to break free of one artistic fashion and invent another. Ruskin believed it took Turner almost 30 years to do this, after the Royal Academy system “repressed his perceptions of truth [and] his capacities of invention”. Having unrepressed himself by a combination of travel, talent and defiance, he became, according to Camille Pissarro, “perhaps the first painter who knew how to make colours blaze out with their natural brilliance”.

Turner’s lasting legacy

Turner’s character also suits our modern conception of The Artist, especially by comparison with Constable, who is usually presented as an overprivileged Tory (wrongly, in my opinion). Turner, the son of a barber, came from unchallengingly humble beginnings. Thanks to his taciturnity we don’t really know what his politics were, or his faith, so he suits all tastes. His sexual peccadilloes and interest in pornography—so shocking to art lovers and academics even up to the late 20th century—make him ideal material for books and films, as in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner (2014), with its captivating representation of human oddity by Timothy Spall in the title role.

All of which brings us to perhaps Turner’s cleverest achievement. He has a lasting legacy because he went out of his way to secure it. In his will he left all of his work to the nation, to be put on public display forever (mostly now at Tate Britain). Thanks to his foresightedness, one of the shows I’m most looking forward to this year will be the Tate’s Turner and Constable (27 November-12 April 2026). Let’s see who comes out best.