Team of rivals: Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable exhibition shows us two ways of seeing the world 

Tate Britain’s big winter show, Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals, brings together the work of the two artists – and it’s the richest, most satisfying thing that I’ve seen hung on London’s walls in a while. If you’re in town for a weekend, make sure you stop by. If you’re around for longer, see it twice. And if you’re a Londoner, go there on foot, since this is a celebration of slowing down and experiencing things at a human scale. Maybe visit it in different conditions to find out if the weather outside makes a difference. A cold day in January might have you hankering to explore the drama of the Alpine sublime as Turner captured it; when spring starts to bud, however, your eye might long for Constable’s English pastoral. After all, both were masters of landscape and weather – and the truths contained within them, great and small. 

Though the exhibition’s title frames the two painters rather pugilistically, the curators stop short of casting them as boxers in the manner of the famous poster for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1985 show at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Instead, we get deep scholarship (bish!), amazing loans from landscape-loving US collections (bash!) and superb pacing and exhibition design (bosh!). 

The only below-the-belt blow is the acknowledgement of the time when Turner, on seeing his seascape “Helvoetsluys” hung next to Constable’s “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge” at the Royal Academy in 1832, decided on the spot to add a blob of red paint to his picture – a buoy or an attempt to upstage his rival? In response, Constable said, “He has been here and fired a gun.” Tate Britain tells this story with a well-chosen clip from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, in which Timothy Spall plays the painter as a tireless, gruff, creative bulldog (woof!).

Turner and Constable were born a year apart (1775 and 1776, respectively) in an era when England was expanding its empire, fighting Napoleon and the Industrial Revolution was rapidly putting chimneys and smokestacks where spires and sails had been. The landscape was becoming political and showing the truth of it put a poet or a painter on a side. 

Turner was born in London. He was a teenage prodigy in the world’s biggest city, where he met noise with some of the same. Constable was a self-taught late starter from Suffolk and his works suggest that he thought there was perfection in that landscape of meadows, willows and quiet country. Both artists saw and painted the outside world while offering glimpses of internal, emotional terrain and presaging the future. Constable’s grief at his wife’s sickness made some of his landscapes seem almost expressionist. Turner’s later run – great washes of cloud, fire, mist and colour – nod to impressionism.

Turner’s work sometimes gives you the feeling of looking at a bright sunrise or remembering a feeling through colour. That’s his version of the truth: it’s in the way you see things. Constable’s details, cloudscapes and cathedrals, on the other hand – you can still find much of these in Salisbury. So the truth is in what’s there. You could do worse than test this maddening, existential question by looking at Turner’s sunsets and Constable’s clouds. There’s no winner here at the Tate Britain but there’s truth in spades.