NewsBeat
Turner & Constable at the Tate: Who is the greater artist?
The title of the show is Turner & Constable, Rivals & Originals. But if Constable is judged, not for his big Academy pictures but for his outdoor oil sketches, his wonderful cloud studies and his late almost expressionist work in which oil is smeared in great thick sweeps, you get a different perspective. Indeed, if you were to start this exhibition backwards at the end of their careers, you would see the avant garde element in both men, though Turner did live 14 years longer. Turner’s astonishing impressionism is evident in all his late work, in the indistinct outlines inside his great washes of translucent paint, the vortices of colour that conjure up atmosphere rather than form.