Tate Britain has hung two paintings by John Constable and JMW Turner together for the first time since 1831, when their display provoked a row between the artists that rumbled on for years.
Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a lyrical rain-sodden landscape with a rainbow as a symbol of hope for the artist heartbroken at the recent death of his wife, has returned to the Tate after a five-year tour of UK galleries where it was seen by at least a million people.
The artist regarded the painting as his greatest work, and in 1831 it hung briefly beside Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, a view of monuments of antiquity fallen into ruin, which a contemporary critic called “one of the most beautiful and magnificent landscapes that ever mind conceived or pencil drew”.
At the Royal Academy in 1831, Constable was the “hangman”, responsible for the placing of the paintings. He initially gave the Turner one of the best positions, in the centre of the end wall of the Great Room at Somerset House, central London, then the home of the academy.
Just before the opening he switched the Turner for his own picture – an outrage the peppery Turner was never going to forgive. The artists met at a dinner party and a row erupted in which Turner “slew Constable without remorse”, according to one account.
The following year the pair again ended up on the same wall at the academy. Constable’s Opening of Waterloo Bridge was a complex painting he had worked on for a decade. Turner’s Helvoetsluys was a simpler seascape.
Just before the opening Turner came in, looked at his painting and added one detail – a small crimson buoy bobbing in the waves that instantly drew the eye of viewers. Constable remarked: “He has been in here and he has fired a gun.”
The 1831 paintings have been reframed and reunited at the Tate for the Fire and Water display, which will include the reviews that remarked on Turner’s poetic imagination and Constable’s naturalism.
The Salisbury Cathedral painting had been on long loan to the National Gallery. It was put up for sale in 2013 but saved from export after a national appeal, major grants from the Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and an unprecedented partnership between the Tate, the national museums and galleries of Wales and Scotland, and the local museums in Colchester, Ipswich and Salisbury.
The painting then went on a long tour, called Aspire, with exhibitions created around it.
Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, said the tour showed creative partnerships could expand the interest in, and understanding of, such masterpieces.
“Constable wanted the work to be seen by as many people across the country as possible. This has encapsulated his wish making this monumental piece of art history available to an every broader audience.”
- Fire and Water will be at Tate Britain from 26 May until July 2019.
