For perhaps a hundred and fifty years most English people made a choice, conscious or otherwise, between Constable and Turner. You liked one and didn’t like the other, because they were different in their approach to landscape. Turner, as he developed moved towards greater abstraction. There may be other reasons why people would like “the Burning of the Houses of Parliament” in 1834, but Turner partly liked the subject because of its licence for red and orange and the swirling of flame. In his time and later, he was rightly seen as the creative artist. The subject matter tended to be bent to his artistic sense to create, as we say, a work of art. Perhaps the mountains went a little more vertical and the storm swirled more in Turner’s paintings. Many people liked his work and they fill the galleries of the land.
Rightly, he is seen as one of the main precursors of modernism. It is not a great jump from the works of Turner to those of the impressionists. Indeed, the influence was directly there, though the Impressionists were also critical of Turner. But they are on the same side, developing the creativity of the artist in their landscapes, using colour in all kinds of new ways, and beginning the transition into the modernist schools of the twentieth century.
So, what is wrong with Turner? Well, sometimes his trees are a bit naff, but let us focus on the moment when the painting viewer turns from the picture back to the normal world I which le or she lives. What do they carry with them? Possibly they retain the image. “That was a great Turner.” Or, “What an incredible effect!” Possibly, there is a disjunction between the world Turner has created and the natural world in which we live. Turner is striving for something more and the natural world is something less.
By comparison with Turner, and many people did compare, Constable was a bit of a plonker. He just did landscapes. They were often big – his six footers – but they were landscapes, rooted in the Stour valley but extending throughout England. We are not concerned about status within the English art establishment – both had problems there and it was mainly a matter of selling and earning a living – but why was Constable different from Turner? He was a Christian. He would have done more explicitly Christian art but the Rector of East Bergholt Church did not pay him for the Resurrection painting he did. There is a lovely expression of his faith in the great Vale of Dedham painting in the National Gallery of Scotland. In the foreground, but quite hidden is a peasant woman’s hovel. It expresses Constable’s concern for poverty, but if you go up very close, round the head of the poor babe with her is a halo. Constable has put Jesus in his great painting. Constable was painting God’s creation. He loved it, and his landscapes are reflecting what was going on. To us the horses and barges are pre-industrial idyllic, but then they were normal rural life. Sometimes he overworked the skies, but Constable is never bigger than the Creator. The landscape is respected, studied, and understood, especially in his smaller cloud studies. The heavens are telling the glory of God.
Interestingly, the area where he tends to theatricality is around Salisbury Cathedral, partly because it became his spiritual home, especially after his wife had died. The views are a little too strong, romanticised, but we can forgive him that. Salisbury Cathedral Spire is an obvious indicator of the Almighty and he used it as such. So my choice is with Constable, because his painting, like that of the Dutch 17th century landscape painters from whom he draws, is painting God’s creation, is reflecting the same glory as I see each day, rain or shine.
In this era of digital cameras everywhere, we can all take landscapes anywhere, often without looking much at them, which are technically better than Turner or Constable. But Constable the artisan bearing witness to God’s creation talks to us even more strongly now. For a century human creativity has been loosed upon the West. It is interesting, sometimes perceptive, but often vain, whether in the Turner Prize – see the echo – creativity of arbitrary choice and self validation or in distorting or ignoring the creation in which we live. Human creativity is as a baby with a rattle in God’s creation, and our western culture is lost within God’s creation.
But Constable was not. Now, of course, we have to peel back nearly two hundred years, but we all need to understand that we are artisans in God’s world, not Creators in our own right, and that is a major cultural revolution. So the painting above is a homage to the Creator and to Constable. It is of the Stour valley slightly downstream from Constable’s main haunts. It is a great spot, but we all have Stour Valleys.
![dedhamoak[2968]](https://i0.wp.com/www.alanstorkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/dedhamoak2968.jpg)
