Englishmen both, Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable were the supreme landscapists of the early 19th century: Turner with his vortexes of air and toppling seas, Constable with his images of the domestic countryside, "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." Both lived through the Industrial Revolution and experienced the strains it exerted on the fabric of English society. Both stood on the threshold of the modern world. But Turner's delight in extremity, the catastrophic sublime rising from a deep instinctive pessimism, makes him appear a "modern" artist—perhaps the first. Not Constable. His green distances and slowly turning water mills, his amiable valleys and serene horizons banked with cumulus seem the last of what was passing, not the first of what was to come.
Whole Man. But categorizing is not that easy. We know Turner's world better than Constable's, or think we do, especially after the splendid Turner retrospective at London's Royal Academy (TIME, Dec. 23, 1974). Now, the same service has been done for Constable, with an exhibition of 335 of his paintings, drawings and watercolors, organized for the Tate Gallery in London by three art historians, Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming-Williams and Conal Shields. It celebrates Constable's 200th birthday and is the largest showing of his work ever. For the first time, one can see the whole man under one roof—from the juvenilia (a graffito he scratched on a beam in the family mill when he was 16) and memorabilia, to the grand series of 6-ft. landscapes he painted in the 1820s and '30s. These include The Hay Wain, The Leaping Horse, Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, Hadleigh Castle. In them Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what Wordsworth had done to it in verse.
There are painters who carry their childhood experience all their lives. It forms the genetic code, the inescapable structure, of their work. Constable was one. He was born in Suffolk, where his father owned water mills on the River Stour. He lived a life of blameless bourgeois obscurity, alternating between London and the Suffolk countryside with his wife Maria Bicknell, who bore him seven children. At 45, he wrote to a friend: "The sound of water escaping from Mill dams ... willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork. I love such things ... I should paint my own places best—Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my 'careless boyhood' to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (and I am grateful) ... I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil."
His childhood was substance rather than fantasy: tactile memories of mold, mud, woodgrain and brick became some of the most "painterly" painting in the history of art. The foreground of The Leaping Horse is all matter, and the things in it—squidgy earth, tangled weeds and wild flowers, prickle of light on the dark skin of water sliding over a hidden ledge—are troweled and spattered on with ecstatic gusto.