John Constable: Competition at the Academy

"The Red Buoy" by J.M.W. Turner

"At the Royal Academy exhibition in 1832, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were assigned places alongside each other in one of the main galleries. Constable had been working on ‘The Opening of Waterloo Bridge’ for fifteen years. In the days before the exhibition, artists were allowed to apply a final coat to their paintings as they hung on the gallery walls. And so Constable painstakingly set about his finishing touches." 

"In his autobiography Constable related how Turner's picture was grey with no positive colour in it. Constable's 'Waterloo' seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while he was brightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind, looking from the 'Waterloo' to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of re-lead somewhat bigger than a shilling on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. He said, 'He has been here, and fired a gun!'

Turner did not come again into the room for a day and a half, and then, in the last moments allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal on his picture and shaped it into a buoy - and thus, 'The Red Buoy' was created.

The critics agreed that Turner’s simpler, more restrained work made ‘The Opening of Waterloo Bridge’ look complex, fussy and ostentatious. The exhibition was a disaster for Constable."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A." by Charles Robert Leslie and a blogpost by Jim Carroll.)