J. M. W. Turner, The Blue Rigi 1841-2, Tate Britain.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) were the greatest landscape painters of their age, and it is excellent that they are simultaneously being celebrated in major exhibitions in two of the leading galleries in London, the city where they both earned their high reputations.1 They were, of course, also rivals and some of England’s sillier critics have chosen to see these parallel exhibitions as a continuation of that rivalry, in the form of a rivalry between Tate Britain, which has major holdings of Turner, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which received a large bequest of paintings from Constable’s last surviving child and is the main center for the study of his work. The comparison is pointless, even odious, for the exhibitions are telling very different stories about two distinctively different English artists united only by their greatness. Each exhibition has to be seen on its own terms and each of the artists on his.

Tate Britain has put on a remarkably comprehensive exhibition of the late work of J. M. W. Turner, from 1835, when he turned sixty, to 1850, the year before his death. By the standards of the first half of the nineteenth century, Turner was by then an old man, and his detractors saw in his work evidence of senility. The curators have been able to show how false that accusation was and to demonstrate