Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky will be on show at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from March 3 until June 12.
Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable were born just one year apart - in 1775 and 1776 respectively. Yet their characters and reputations could hardly have been more different.
After the dinner - on June 28, 1813 - at the Royal Academy in London, the staid, God-fearing Constable seemed surprisingly taken with the mercurial man who had been seated next to him. He told Maria, his longstanding fiancee, that he had been "a good deal entertained with Turner ... he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind".
But Constable had every reason to feel jealous of Turner. Though Constable had enjoyed the more prosperous childhood - his father was a wealthy Suffolk mill owner and corn merchant, while Turner's father was a mere barber and wig maker in Covent Garden - it had been Turner who had been accepted by the Establishment as the prodigy. Constable was cast as a plodder, one of the carthorses that feature so heavily in his paintings.
At 27, Turner had been elected as one of the 40 full members of the academy, already recognised as probably the greatest British landscape artist of his generation. Constable had to wait another 27 years before he was finally elected. And though he won acclaim, even fame, in his later years, it was only really after he died in 1837 - aged 60, a few weeks before Victoria became Queen - that people began to ask the enduring question. Which of the two - Turner or Constable - was the greatest British artist of all time? It's a conundrum Australians have an ideal opportunity to ponder when the largest Constable exhibition in this country for 30 years opens at the National Gallery of Australia on March 3. Viewers can also consider two other questions. How did Constable shape the landscape artists who came after him? And what debt do Australian artists owe him?
Dr Anna Gray, the gallery's assistant director, Australian art, has spent the past two years immersed in Constable's life and art - "begging" for the 108 paintings, watercolours, drawings and sketches by the artist that make up the main exhibition, Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky.
She has also curated a free "bonus" exhibition, Constable and Australia, which examines how "the power of Constable's art" has inspired and influenced generations of Australian artists, from Conrad Martens, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton to modern-day artists such as the photographer and printmaker Lesley Duxbury.
"I fell in love with Constable years ago," Gray says. "I came to him because I was doing work on Australian artists, and a lot of Australian artists looked to Constable as one of their gurus. Inevitably you follow in their footsteps."
Yet for much of the 20th century, Constable was a deeply unfashionable artist, someone whose greatest paintings - The Hay Wain, Salisbury Cathedral, Dedham Lock - became, in Gray's words, "attached to a National Trust view of the world". Though we gazed longingly at his seemingly romantic portrayals of a largely pre-industrial age, we doubted they had much relevance to the post-industrial, consumer-led society we live in. Even in Britain, Constable was seen as passe, old-fashioned, unchallenging. "But Constable has always been popular in France," Gray says. "Artists like Delacroix and Gericault, impressionists like Sisley and Pissarro, acknowledged his genius.
"And when Lucian Freud created his Constable show in Paris in 2002, it was a huge success, reinvigorating Constable, putting him back up there."
Given the renewed interest in the artist, it's impressive that the NGA has managed to persuade so many galleries and private collectors to lend such important works ("I'm a tart," she jokes. "I get down on my knees and beg.") She didn't get The Hay Wain, of course. She didn't even bother asking: "It's the Mona Lisa of the [British] National Gallery."
But there are iconic canvases. The large painting A Boat Passing a Loch is there, rated by Constable so highly that it became his diploma painting, handed to the Royal Academy when he was finally elected. In Canberra, that version will be hung alongside the study for the same painting, which usually hangs at the National Gallery of Victoria. Also included are Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds, from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Vale of Dedham - the final version of a scene he'd painted many times over a career - from the National Gallery of Scotland.
Yet as important as these great paintings are, it is Constable's sketches, studies, drawings and watercolours that provide the real insight into the way he worked.
Though Constable is now often seen as the epitome of conservative, the key to understanding him, Gray says, is that he was "a modernist, a revolutionary in his time". Like Turner, Constable was hugely influenced by Claude, the great 18th-century French landscape artist. "But each made something different out of what they saw. I would sum up the difference as this. Turner is about light. Constable is about air. And being able to capture air in a painting is a slightly more difficult thing ... No artist, before or since, could capture the atmosphere like Constable did. The air between the trees, the air behind the trees. The dews. The sense of dampness in the air." Or, as the Swiss artist Fuseli put it, "I've got to put on an overcoat and take an umbrella when I look at a Constable painting."
Like his contemporaries William Wordsworth and Jane Austen, Constable was a modernist. Like them, he moved in a limited world. Suffolk's Stour Valley, Hampstead; the occasional seaside visit to Brighton. And like them, by limiting his world, "instead of trying to cover the entire universe, he got to know it by heart", Gray says.
The studies he made outdoors helped popularise what the French came to call plein air painting, a cornerstone of Impressionism. Look at a sketch such as Rainstorm Over The Sea, painted in a flurry about 1824, and it's not hard to see the link.
His famous studies of clouds - there's an entire roomful of them in the NGA show - were equally influential. "Other artists had done cloud sketches," Gray says. "But no one did them as extensively or as obsessively as he did. He marked what the weather had been like not just on the day, but on the day before and the day after. His clouds were recorded as the passing of time, part of a universe over which we have no control."
The other big difference between Constable and Turner - and the main reason why Turner's work was considered superior when they were alive - was Constable's determination to paint the commonplace. "We can see Turner's light in the impressionists. But their subject matter was ordinary, everyday people," Gray says. "They don't get that from Turner. Turner's subject matter was Hannibal crossing the Alps or The Fighting Temeraire. Grandiose historical and mythological subjects. They took their subject matter from Constable, as well as their truth of colour."
But if Constable was the master of gloomy skies and sombre light, what did he have to teach Australians, adapting to our own cloud-starved skies? "So many Australian artists are landscape artists. You can't live in Australia, even the city, and not be obsessed by our landscape," Gray points out. "Even though Constable was painting British landscapes, what shines through is his sensitivity to the natural world. If you walk outdoors at night in Australia and observe the way the light is shining through the trees, you do so in a Constablian way."
And so, after all these years, has Constable himself finally emerged from Turner's shadow? Well, up to a point. As Gray points out, the BBC recently held a poll to answer the question: "What is Britain's greatest painting?" The Hay Wain came second, with 18 per cent of the vote.
And the winner? With 27 per cent of the vote, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.
Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky will be on show at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from March 3 until June 12.