Turner Info

American Geographical Society
Constable, Turner, and Views of Nature in the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Ronald Rees
Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. 253-269
Published by: American Geographical Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/214526
Accessed: 10-11-2015 18:34 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Wiley and American Geographical Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Geographical Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.7 on Tue, 10 Nov 2015 18:34:23 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The
VOLUME 72
Geographical Review
July, 1982
NUMBER 3
CONSTABLE, TURNER, AND VIEWS OF NATURE

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
RONALD REES
THE
history of landscape painting is the history of conceptions of nature.

A landscape painting is a record not only of a place but also of the painter
and of the age that made him.' Two painters who represented their age,
particularly its views of nature, were John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. As
landscape painters, Englishmen, and almost exact contemporaries, these artists
are a standard pairing of European art. A critical or biographical work on one
cannot avoid reference to the other, and in the National Gallery, London, their
paintings share the same room. Yet instead of being the Castor and Pollux of
English art, as these juxtapositions suggest, Constable and Turner were its
antipodes. A measure of the distance between them was the partisan nature
of the support each attracted; devotees of one were seldom tolerant of the other.
John Ruskin, a powerful champion of Turner, dismissed Constable as a painter
of subjects of a "low order" and accused him of banality: "Constable perceives
in a landscape that the grass is wet, the meadows flat, and the boughs shady;
that is to say about as much as, I suppose, might in general be apprehended
between them, by an intelligent fawn and a skylark."2 As if to redress the
balance, the renowned collector Sir George Beaumont, an early sponsor of Constable, accused Turner of hyperbole, of "perpetually aiming to be extraordinary," and of producing works that were "capricious and singular."3 That
Turner and Constable became the two acclaimed giants of English landscape
painting in spite of such attacks suggests that they both expressed recognizable
truths. The contention here is that these truths represented main, but
divergent, streams of nineteenth-century thought.
The two painters were products of backgrounds that differed enough to
support the notion that childhood experience signally affects adult views of the
world. Constable was Fortune's child. Bom to prosperous millowners in the
Stour Valley of Suffolk, he had an idyllic childhood-1"a careless boyhood," in
his own words. So attached was he to his birthplace that he chose a sketch of
David Bell, The Artist in Wales (London: Harrap, 1957), p. 13.

John Ruskin, Modern Painters (5 vols.; London: George Allen, 1900-1904), Vol. 3, p. 172.
in Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (New York: Museum of Modem
3Quoted
Art, 1966), p. 9.
1
* MR. REES is an associate professor of geography

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,
Canada S7N OWO.
at the University
of Saskatchewan,
Copyright (?) 1982 by the American Geographical Society of New York
254
THE GEOGRAPHICAL
REVIEW
the house in which he was born for the frontispiece to "English Landscape,"
a collection of mezzotints based on his work, and accompanied the drawing
with a Virgilian description of the setting. "The beauty of the surrounding
scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats sprinkled with flocks
and herds, its well cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous
scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to
this particular spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be
found. "4
In contrast, Turner's childhood environment was Dickensian. Turner was
city bred; he grew up in the Covent Garden district of central London, within
a few hundred yards of the Thames. His father was a barber in Maiden Lane,
and his mother, who died in an asylum for the insane, came from a family of
butchers. The Turner family lived in a few rooms above the barber shop. Ruskin described the setting: "Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a
square brick pit or well is formed by a close set block of houses, to the back
windows of which it admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is
obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; and if
you stand long enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to the darkness you may see on the left hand a narrow door, which formerly gave quiet
access to a respectable barber's shop, of which the front window, looking into
Maiden Lane, is still extant, filled, in this year (1860), with a row of bottles,
connected, in some defunct manner, with a brewer's business."5
In matters of personality and general accomplishment, Constable was the
better favored. He was handsome and open natured, whereas Turner was
"small, tough, taciturn," to use Michael Kitson's taut phrase.6 Turner had very
little formal education, and he neither spoke nor wrote with any fluency.
Nevertheless, he was a man of "eminent sense and shrewdness." Constable
found Turner blessed with a "wonderful range of mind" but thought him
uncouth.7 Constable, in contrast, was fine mannered, articulate in speech, and
a gifted writer. The nicknames each attracted are instructive. Constable was
"Honest John" and "The Handsome Miller," while Turner was "Old Blackbird," "Admiral Booth," and "Avalanche Jenkinson." Turner's manner, rolling
gait and "lobster-red" face gave him the look of a sailor or a stagecoachman.
Twenty years after his meeting with Turner, Eugene Delacroix wrote: "I was
not particularly impressed; he looked like an English farmer with his rough
black coat and heavy boots, and his cold, hard expression."8
APPROACHES
TO LANDSCAPE
In developing approaches to landscape, Constable was the more resolute.

To a friend he wrote that he wanted to be a "natural painter," by which he
Lucas, English Landscape (London: Henry A. Bolus, 1833). The passage is quoted in C.
R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Phaidon, 1951 [originally published in
1845]), p. 1.
5Ruskin, footnote 2 above, Vol. 5, pp. 375-376.
6 Michael Kitson, J. M. W. Turner (London: Blandford Press, 1964), p. 7.
7Leslie, footnote 4 above, p. 44.
8 The Journal of Eugene Delacroix (edited by Hubert Wellington; New York: Garland, 1979), p.
272.
4David
CONSTABLE
AND
TURNER
255
meant a painter who would try to represent nature as he saw it. He considered
bravura, "an attempt to do something beyond the truth," to be the great vice
of the day.9 To avoid bravura, Constable decided to paint only landscapes that
he knew and to rely as much as possible on direct observation. His models
were the ""stay-at-home" Dutch landscape painters and the naturalist Gilbert
White of Selborne. Every sentence White wrote was a record of his own observations. White called himself "an outdoor naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others," and his
approach to nature became Constable's standard.10
Although Constable was aware of his debts to other painters, he resolved
to stop "running after pictures" and "seeking the truth at second hand."'" To
concentrate his vision he limited his geographical range. He was the most
parochial of major painters. As a young man he visited the Peak and the Lake
districts, but he found the mountains oppressive. Thereafter he never left
southern England, and he painted only places with which he had personal
associations: Stour Valley, Hampstead Heath, Salisbury, and Brighton. His
affection for particular places was an expression of the love of locality that
burgeoned into the regional movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.12 Constable's paintings, his biographer C. R. Leslie remarked, formed
a history of his affections. The mainspring of his art was his love of the Stour
Valley, now the "Constable country." His feeling for the valley inspired this
moving hymn to place: "Still I should paint my own places best; painting is
with me but another word for feeling, and I associate 'my careless boyhood'
with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter,
and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before I ever
touched a pencil."'13
Place was not as important to Turner. Wary of attachments, he never established a permanent home. As a painter he needed not familiar places but locations where he could observe the interplay of his favorite phenomena: water,
mist, and sunlight. He liked best the sea, Venice, and the Alps. Ruskin stressed
the importance of Turner's first experience of landscape at the mouth of the
Thames. The tidal river mouth presented a flux of moving water, color, and
light, not tangible, static forms.14
Unlike Constable, who never went abroad, Turner traveled frequently and
far. He visited the picturesque districts of England, Wales, and southern Scotland when he was a young topographer, and at twenty he had a reputation as
a first-class draftsman and architectural recorder. On the first of several visits
abroad he, like Ruskin, was captivated by the Alps. On Turner's return to
England he remarked that in Switzerland he saw "very fine thunderstorms
among the mountains-fragments
and precipices very romantic and strikingly
9 Leslie, footnote 4 above, p. 15.
" Quoted in Kurt Badt, John Constable's Clouds (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p.
74.
" Leslie, footnote 4 above,
p. 15.
12 For a short treatment of regionalism in the nineteenth
century see F. W. Morgan, Three Aspects
of Regional Consciousness, Sociological Review, Vol. 32, 1939, pp. 68-88.
13
Leslie, footnote 4 above, p. 86.
14
Ruskin, footnote 2 above, Vol. 5, p. 379.
256
THE GEOGRAPHICAL
REVIEW
grand."115 Later he thought Niagara Falls, which he knew only from pictures,
to be "'the greatest wonder in nature." He never tired of hearing descriptions

about it, asserted the American photographer J. J. E. Mayall, whose Regent
Street studio Turner frequently visited.16
It was the stay-at-home Constable, not the adventurous Turner, who at first
was the more radical painter. Constable's determination to be a natural painter
challenged the canon of established art in England. The Royal Academy,
founded in 1768 expressly to promote the tenets of classical and Renaissance
art, stressed the superiority of ideal over natural forms and generalized over
particular landscapes. Landscapes that looked too natural were rejected as
"1mappy," and, even when idealized, they had to be elevated by historical or
exotic subjects. Exemplars of the neoclassical style were the seventeenth-century painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain who used idealized Italian
landscapes as settings for incidents from classical mythology and the Bible. The
Claudian transfiguration of landscape became an accepted feature of English
life and art. Gentlefolk in search of scenery carried the famed Claude glass-a
rectangular, tinted mirror that deadened local color in favor of evenness of
tone. The influential Sir George Beaumont pronounced that a good painting
should be the color of a Cremona violin. Constable ignored the maxim and in
turn was ignored by the Royal Academy. He was fifty-two years old before the
academy admitted him to full membership, and even then his acceptance was
decided by a single vote. A year after his acceptance he suffered a painful
embarrassment. The now-popular "Water-meadows near Salisbury," submitted
without identification to the academy's hanging committee, was castigated as
"a nasty green thing" and rejected.
Unlike the quixotic and unworldly Constable, Turner was a realist. Approval by the Royal Academy was his first aim, and to achieve it he was prepared to adopt the styles of other painters. Turner quickly won recognition as
a painter of conventional landscapes and seascapes, illustrating historical subjects, after the style of well-known painters of the Italian and Dutch schools.
His early submissions to the academy so pleased the jurors that he was made
an associate member when he was twenty-four years old, the youngest possible
age for admission, and he became a full member at age twenty-six.
Turner's early paintings were deceptive because they gave no hint of the
revolutionary changes to come. Two themes were to preoccupy him: form expressed as color and light, and the power in nature. Paintings exhibited at the
academy a few years after his election heralded the change from a conventional
to a revolutionary vision.17 One, ostensibly a painting of fishermen cleaning
and selling fish, was in effect a celebration of color and light as entities in
themselves. Another work, showing the destruction of a cottage by an avalanche, was supposedly set in the Alps, but the forms were so simplified and
abstracted that the painting could have been an essay on natural violence anywhere. Avalanches, storms, fires, and raging seas became persistent subjects
Quoted in Kitson, footnote 6 above, p. 11.
John Gage, Colour in Turner (London: Studio Vista, 1969), p. 121.
17 "Sun Rising through Vapour" and "Cottage destroyed by an Avalanche," in Diana Hirsh, The
World of Turner (New York: Time-Life Books, 1974), p. 62.
15
16
CONSTABLE AND TURNER
257
FIG. l-"Valley of Aosta-Snowstorm,

Avalanche, and Thunderstorm" (1836-37) by J. M. W.
Turner (Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago).
that at first were settings for historical events, but that later became subjects
in themselves (Fig. 1). With the change, conventional images of natural phenomena in general were abandoned. William Hazlitt described the later paintings in which forms are barely discernible as "pictures of nothing," and Constable called them visions painted "with tinted steam, so evanescent and airy"
(Fig. 2).18
Compared with the bravura of Turer's later paintings, Constable's works seem
tamely conventional to a modern eye (Figs. 3 and 4). His portrayals of land and
life in rural southern England are so close to the common experience and have
become so familiar through incessant reproduction that it is easy to forget that
Constable was a radical painter both in the subjects that he chose to paint and
in the ways in which he painted them. At a time when other painters were
sifting through history and mythology for dramatic and heroic subjects, Constable
settled for old brickwork, ploughed fields, rotting banks, and slimy posts. He was
the founder of naturalism in English art in addition to being the inspiration
of the Barbizon painters and of the impressionists. But for most of his life
connoisseurs in England regarded his work as unpleasantly green, rough, and
unfinished.
Hazlitt's observation is quoted in Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 13. Constable's statement is

quoted in Graham Reynolds, Turner (New York: Harry Abrams, 1969), p. 150.
18
258
THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW
FIG. 2-"Yacht
London).
Approaching the Coast" (1840-1845) by J. M. W. Turner (The Tate Gallery,
CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE
Paintings ostensibly in the same genre, namely landscape, but so different

in character, evidently expressed fundamental differences in conception. For
Constable nature was the tangible world of field, stream, and flower: the geographical reality. He saw it both as a poet and as a natural scientist. He had
a working knowledge of geology, meteorology, and botany, and, like many
romantics, he was a morphologist who believed that form should be approached
through a study of structure and process, not of classical models. "We see
nothing till we understand it." "Painting is a science, and should be pursued
as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting
be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the
experiments?"19
An empirical approach to painting was consistent with the science and the
philosophy of the age, if not with its art. Interest in the natural sciences quickened in the second half of the eighteenth century. Botany, geology, and meteorology became independent of natural history, and their practitioners embarked on precise empirical research. Natural phenomena were examined in
situ both at home and abroad. For poets and painters the discoveries of the
natural scientists opened windows on the natural world. Goethe responded to
Luke Howard's cloud classification, which bestowed "form on the formless,"
19 Leslie, footnote 4 above, pp. 318 and 323.
259
CONSTABLE AND TURNER

*,>
ti.
7ttA-;>
.
..
...
X_*.
__
::
....
.j
a_
__t)_E
_&_
1.
_s
1.
ls
.S
I
A
5iS
_.
fi
...
fi
AS
1'; E
Se
,-_
FIG. 3. "View on the Stour" (1822) by John Constable (Henry E. Huntington Library and Art
Gallery, San Marino, Cal.).
ttF
. .4ris.
wv^D-v--4i
---
-*y
..W
-
. *
:::
g:_
__55>e
SFh.F_
___e__
_Fs
:::: -
--Cq;.::
''
rsq_
_!
___
I_.
!l
ot- ^
M .'*.^Ri*
sil.o X ..:: . ..
| | s-ty si ' 's.
K-
fi
u I | gI | h I S t |
_! _
_; iSi I
_
I _R
Stour Valley and Dedham Church" (1815) by John Constable (Courtesy, Museum
FIG. "The
of Fine Arts, Boston; purchased William W. Warden Fund).
260
THE GEOGRAPHICAL
REVIEW
with a number of commemorative poems. Constable's response was "a good

deal of skying"-a sketchbook full of cloud studies.20 As architect of the morphological approach to nature, Goethe believed that the highest artistic expression, as opposed to a superficial likeness, required a profound understanding
of structure and process.
As well as illuminating natural form, the morphological approach impressed
on natural scientists the importance of relationships between phenomena.
Ideas of interdependence that suggested a unity or harmony in nature appealed
so strongly to the romantic imagination that promotion of them was considered
to be an artistic duty. Goethe, who thought of nature as a unified whole,
assigned to painters the task of "harmonising the phenomena of the external
world one with another;" Alexander von Humboldt, who was just as intent on
combining artistic and scientific interests, urged painters to use their "almost
magical command of masses and forms" to demonstrate the "conception of the
natural unity and the feeling of harmonious accord pervading the universe."21
Although there is no evidence to prove direct influence from Goethe or Humboldt, Constable was conversant with the main philosophical and scientific
ideas of the age. His landscape paintings were not assemblages, but rather
were integrated wholes that reflected his acceptance of the principle of harmony
in nature. "The Haywain," for example, is a triumph of the ecological viewpoint (Fig. 5).
The Haywain is the representation not so much of a 'genre scene' as of the
harmonious interaction of diverse life-processes, including of course the animal
and the human. It is a successful representation of a complex of transitions
because it is organized to arouse our sense of that vital unity which merely
accurateimitation of discrete physical appearanceswould obscure. The Haywain
will have little value for us, except as a jig-saw puzzle or brewery advertisement,
unless we recognize that it renders Constable's vision into the life-processes
which are the essence of nature, into that which cannot merely be seen but must
be felt inwardly and must be understood 'scientifically', that is, appreciated as
a complex ecological system of interdependencies.22
Though strongly influenced by developments in the natural sciences, Constable believed that their methods would take him only so far. His ultimate
goals were spiritual, not scientific, and to achieve them he considered reflection
to be more important than empirical research. Like William Wordsworth, Constable believed that nature was divine and that, if contemplated with sufficient
devotion, it would reveal moral and spiritual qualities. "'The landscape
painter," he once advised a group of students, "must walk in the fields with
an [sic] humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see nature in
all her beauty. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would say
most emphatically to the student, Remember now thy Creator in the days of
Goethe's observation is quoted in Badt, footnote 10 above, p. 20; Constable's in Leslie, footnote
4 above, p. 85. There is no substantial documentary evidence to prove that Constable was familiar
with Howard's classification, but it is very likely that he knew of it.
Cosmos (5 vols.; London:
21 Badt, footnote 10 above, p. 21; and Alexander von Humboldt,
H. G. Bohn, 1848-1858), Vol. 2, pp. 98 and 99.
22 Karl Kroeber, Constable and Wordsworth: The Ecological Moment of Romantic Art, Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 34, 1971, p. 382.
20
CONSTABLE
AND
TURNER
261
thy youth."23 Leslie remarked that if Constable saw a tree that he admired he
would respond "with an ecstasy of delight like that with which he would catch
up a beautiful child in his arms."24
An approach to nature that combined elements of religion and science produced an all-embracing vision. In principle, no object and no landscape were
beneath regard. Constable asserted that he never saw an ugly thing in his life
and that every lane and hedgerow held subjects for his "limited and abstracted
art."25Constable's "morbid preference," as Ruskin called it, made for subjects
of a "low order"-the everyday objects and activities of the English countryside.26 Except for his cloud and plant studies, Constable painted only manmade
landscapes, not natural ones. He preferred canals to mountain streams and mill
dams to waterfalls. When a piece of common land near his childhood home
was enclosed, he showed no sentimental regret but recorded its first ploughing.
He rejected nature unmodified by man as wilderness and extended his censure
to gentle downland and even to gentlemen's parks, because unproductive, they
were "not nature."27 As Leslie noted, Constable's temperament "was peculiarly
social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself, that
did not abound in human associations. He required villages, churches, farmhouses, and cottages; and I believe it was as much from natural temperament
as from early impressions that his first love, in landscape, was also his latest
love."28
All threatening expressions of nature Constable banished from his world.

Except for a brief period of despair following the death of his wife, he like the
eighteenth-century natural historians believed that nature and man were the
subject of purposeful design. His paintings embodied the teleological viewpoint. Men built, ploughed, and harvested under summer skies, and their
fields, hedges, barges, and houses were as integral to the landscape as the trees
and the streams. His landscapes were the expression of a social vision whose
core was a productive, well-organized countryside. He excluded beggars and
laborers bent with toil.29 His strongest assertion of the design argument was
made in his last public lecture. "Man is the sole intellectual inhabitant of one
vast natural landscape. His nature is congenial with the elements of the planet
itself."30 Each of the six-foot canvases that he exhibited at the Royal Academy,
and by which he hoped to be remembered, celebrated the harmony of man
and nature.
Constable's need for harmony extended to his view of people in their social
and political relationships. Politically he was an old-style, rural Tory who believed that social and economic stability in England rested on a flourishing
agriculture. The passage of the 1832 reform bill, which extended the franchise
25
R. B. Beckett, John Constable's Correspondence (6 vols.; Ipswich, U. K.: Suffolk Records Society,
1962-1968), Vol. 3, p. 59.
26
Ruskin, footnote 2 above, Vol. 1, p. 191.
27 Badt, footnote 10 above, p. 65.
28 Leslie, footnote 4 above, pp. 18-19.
29 For this omission
Constable is rebuked in John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The
Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 133-134.
30
23
24
4 |
E
1N
<~~~~~~~~
<~~~~~~~~~
i~~~~~~~~~
r~~~~~~~
rX~~~~~
|---,1.
a
fl
v
t.
i.
sE
x4s~~~~~~~~~~~~
z~~~~~
.=-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
l*, .4
,--S
"
-~~~~~~~~~~
F4;...1
n~~~~~~~~~~~
^~~
Ufqi3ts
$fr
n
j:t'
fil4 s....
t
"':
,.
I
11|11 E
I
!
BS R. . R
< w.
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(
'
-e~~~~~~
,t
*,>4
_ ly,
<
.,s<
xo~~~~~
H~~~~~~
N~~~~~~~~~~~
E
S_
1-1
~~~~~~
ffi~~~~~
CONSTABLE
AND
TURNER
263
and eliminated the "rotten boroughs," is asserted to have left him bedridden
with depression.3' Constable simply ignored the great engine of change itself,
the Industrial Revolution, except for its effects on the design of ploughs and
harrows. Constable's world was the age-old one of wood, wind, and waterof barges, horses, sails, and canals, not of railways and steam engines. His
favorite landscapes were the distant, timeless landscapes of childhood, preserved in the amber of memory. In them the weather is always fair (showery
at worst), the time late afternoon, and the season luxuriant high summer. Ruskin rebuked him for his timidity in not risking the "majesty of storms," and
his great friend Archdeacon Fisher complained of Constable's predictability:
"mutton at top, mutton at bottom, and mutton at the side."32 But at a time of
rapid and radical change the predictability of the paintings was a balm.
Turner's view of nature was less reassuring. His world was one of forces,
not forms. He dismissed conventional landscapes as "pictures of bits" and
visual realism as a vain fancy whose practitioners were "pleased with simple
subjects."33 He was so uninterested in reproducing appearances that he seldom
painted from nature. Graham Reynolds pointed out that in the thousands of
sketches in the Turner bequest there are very few detailed studies of plants
and that when Turner wanted to paint a tree he was as likely to borrow one
of Claude's as to invent one of his own.34 Turner's abiding interest lay in the
universals of nature, not the particulars. Thus Ruskin grandiloquently assessed
Turner as an omnipotent painter sent "as a prophet of God to reveal to man
the mysteries of His Universe."35 The natural forms with the most appeal to
Turner were the fundamental ones: mountains, seas, and atmosphere that he
preferred to see in violent motion. Elemental energy fascinated him, and, as
his search for essences intensified, external appearances occupied him less and
less. Earth and vegetation, the conventional materials of landscape, had decreasing importance in his work. Turner's final preoccupations were the four
ancient elements: earth, air, fire, and water. He loved to see these interfused.
Favorite combinations were the sun rising above water, fire at sea, storms in
mountains, and sunlight seen through fog, mist, and smoke. The heavily filtered London sun, likened by Constable to a pearl seen through a burnt glass,
gave Turner much pleasure. The chasm dividing their interests was shown by
their responses to the burning of the palace of Westminster in 1834. For Constable the fire was a historical event that he and two of his sons watched. For
Turner it was a rare opportunity to observe the destructiveness of fire and the
interplay of fire and water. He made nine color sketches of the fire from several
vantage points and, later, two finished paintings.
Hazlitt was the first person to notice Turner's practice of denying the separate identity of things by fusing the elements. "The artist delights to go back
to the first chaos of the world, or to that state of things, when the waters were
separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no living thing
nor tree bearing fruit was seen on the face of the earth. All is without form
31
32
33
34
35
Hirsh, footnote 17 above, p. 142.

Ruskin, footnote 2 above, Vol. 1, p. 191; and Leslie, footnote 4 above, p. 131.
Quoted in Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 13.
Reynolds, footnote 18 above, p. 12.
Quoted in John Waller, Turner (New York: Harry Abrams, 1976), p. 31.
264
THE GEOGRAPHICAL
REVIEW
and void."36 Though impatient with exercises that he regarded as "a waste of
morbid strength," Hazlitt understood that Turner was exploring a more fundamental order of reality, not simply experimenting with a new means of
representation.
Unlike Constable and the natural scientists who dealt with visible, tangible
form, Turner's interests lay "behind the phenomena," that is, in underlying
structures. By inclination he was a natural philosopher rather than a natural
historian or a natural scientist. Formulated in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was a product of the speculative phase in
the development of science. Natural philosophers sought to understand the
essence of phenomena and the general forces that governed nature. They reasoned, a priori, that force rather than matter was the ultimate reality and that
the form and structure of objects endured only through the perpetual flux of
their material particles. Waterfalls and columns of smoke were early examples.
They thought the forces were indestructible and that they were manifest as
heat, electricity, magnetism, and chemical affinity. These particular speculations were supported by experimental science in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Connections were found between light and heat, light and chemical
affinity, electricity and magnetism, and electricity and chemical affinity that
appeared to prove the primacy of force and the interconvertibility of the various
forces of nature. Electricity and chemical affinity, for example, were described
as manifestations of "one power," and evaporation and rainfall as stages in the
interconversion of air and water.37
To the romantics, a general theory of the unity of nature based on the
transmutability of the elements appealed just as much as one based on the
interdependence of natural phenomena. Though romantic poets and painters
were not usually interested in the minutiae of science, they were attracted by
the principles of unity and harmony that science seemed to establish. Chemistry, for example, was seen as an enthralling pursuit that promised to reveal
the unity of matter as well as to produce new substances. For Coleridge, who
introduced natural philosophy to England, chemistry through "striving after
unity of principle, through all the diversity of forms," was "poetry, as it were,
substantiated and realised."38
Turner's belief in the underlying unity of the elements is evident in his
paintings and his general scientific interests. His cast of mind was exploratory.
The photographer Mayall was impressed with Turner's "inquisitive disposition." Turner himself noted, "Every glance is a glance for study, contemplating
and defining qualities and causes, effects and incidents, and develops by practice the possibility of attaining what appears mysterious upon principle. "3
Turner was not bookish, but, like most enlightened men of the age, he was
interested in the development of science. His small library contained copies of
Sir Isaac Newton's "Optics" (1704), P. J. Macquer's "Elements of the Theory
Quoted in Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 13.
D. M. Knight, The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement, History of Science, Vol. 9,
1970, pp. 54-75; and D. M. Knight, German Science in the Romantic Period, in The Emergence of
Science in Western Europe (edited by Maurice Crosland; New York: Science History Publications,
1976), pp. 164-165.
38 Quoted in Knight, The Physical Sciences, footnote 37 above, p. 62.
39 Gage, footnote 16 above, pp. 121 and 119.
36
37
CONSTABLE
AND
TURNER
265
and Practice of Chemistry" (1764), Mary Somerville's "Mechanism of the Heavens" (1831), and George Field's "Outlines of Analogical Philosophy" (1839).
Field, a chemist, colormaker, and philosopher, attempted to combine all
branches of knowledge in a scheme of universal analogy based on a belief in
the unity of nature. Somerville also pursued unifying principles. She remarked
on the then current tendency to simplify the laws of nature and noted that the
analogies so far discovered, for example, between electricity and magnetism
and light and heat, "justified the expectation that all phenomena would ultimately be referred to the same agent."40 A keen amateur painter as well as a
leading scientist, Somerville made several visits to Turner's studio.
Turner's favorite science was optics. He was fascinated by the newly invented kaleidoscope, by photography, and by Somerville's experiments with
the magnetizing properties of certain colors. Violet and indigo and, less conspicuously, blue and green could magnetize a needle. For Turner the experiments demonstrated the hidden powers of light. He made a determined
effort to master the science of color, in the course of which he read and critically
annotated Goethe's "Farbenlehre" ("Theory of Light"). He wrote copious notes
on the characteristics of light, and he observed in a reverie how an infinite
series of reflections from an endless variety of surfaces produced colors that
mingled and penetrated ultimately to every recess. The observation amounted
to an idiosyncratic perception, or "whole view," of the physical world.41 In
certain paintings of Venice and Norham Castle, for example, Turner reversed the
old order of reality by giving precedence to light and color, not material form (Figs.
6 and 7). By dissolving objects into light and color he challenged the view that
solidity conferred reality that could be verified by the age-old test of touching or
tapping. Nineteenth-century science vindicated Turner's intuition. Elaboration
of the theories of sound and light pressed scientists to a more careful analysis of
the different states in which matter can exist. Discovery that a substance as
attenuated as ether should also have the properties of a solid and that brittle
substances such as ice and pitch could flow if subjected to slow pressure
revolutionized scientific notions about the nature of materiality.42
In addition to holding different views of nature, Constable and Turner also
differed on the question of appropriate artistic attitudes toward it. Constable's
artist was a passive figure, a humble walker in the fields, engaged in intense,
but pious observation. Turner's artist was an adventurer, more hero than humble acolyte. Turner, whom Constable rebuked for wanting to be "Lord over
all," stated his position in the manner of Mark Akenside:
High born soul - not to descend to any humble
quarry- for amid the various formswhich this fall
would present
Like rivals to his choice, what human breast
E'er doubts, before the transient and Minute,
To Prize the Vast, the Stable, the Sublime?43
" Mary Somerville, On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (London: 1834), preface.
Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 20.
42 John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth
Century (4 vols.; London: Blackwood, 1912), Vol. 2, p. 56.
43 Quoted in Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 28.
4'
REVIEW
THE GEOGRAPHICAL
266
i[A
!!!mRl
-t
A *
.........................
..
.t,,.
,>'s
v!>\v.,.v0
t;
Fj'
i -,z, ..........................................j.,,,
j,,b~~~~~~~~~'1
0
j
.
J1r.
i
'
*ti
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i
;
__
2-
~~~~~~~~~~~~wFr
FIG. 6"The
Dogana,
Turner (The Tate Gallery,
San Giorgio,
London).
.....
......
from the steps of the Europa"
Citella,
.. ... ... .................

............
.,... . .
z%>q
t4
(1842) by J. M. W.
.......
......
..gy
......
'
...
b:lgv~~~Efi.Sf
i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
l
:c
gF
l~~~~~~~~~~~~V
Al
m0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
........
7-Nra
FIG.>>II3
ate
urs"(8514)b
.W
ue
TeTt
alr,Lno)
CONSTABLE
FIG. 8-"Snowstorm:
Gallery, London).
AND
267
TURNER
Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth" (1842) by J. M. W. Turer (The Tate
By casting the artist as hero and venturer, Turner exposed himself to intellectual and physical risk. His duty, he averred, was to paint what he saw, not
what convention told him was there. In order to see what a storm at sea was
really like, Turner in his sixty-eighth year had himself lashed to the mast of a
cross-channel packet in a storm that became so severe that he feared he would
not survive. The result of his four-hour ordeal was the painting "Snowstorm,"
a compelling vortex of wind, snow, and water that many now regard as his
penultimate work (Fig. 8)4 "Snowstorm" is a mimetic reminder of an experience; it is a picture of being in a storm, not a view of one.4 As an extraordinary vision of primary forces, it is rivaled only by "Rain, Steam and Speed:
The Great Western Railway." "Rain, Steam and Speed" had a similar provenance. Turner put his head out the window of a London-Exeter train for ten
minutes during a torrential downpour. After he returned his head to the compartment,
his face streaming
with
water,
he sat with
his eyes
shut for a quarter
of an hour. Mrs. Simon, a fellow passenger in the compartment, witnessed the

episode, copied the experiment, and asserted some months later that "Rain,
In Tumer's final phase the vortex ruled; wind and water were subjected to dynamic, vortical
movement. At about the same time Lord Kelvin was formulating the vortex theory of matter as an
aspect of the kinetic view of nature. Merz, footnote 42 above, pp. 64-66; and Jack Lindsay, J. M.
W. Tumer (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1966), pp. 200-201.
45 Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 20.
44
268
THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW
Steam and Speed", then on exhibit at the Royal Academy, was a distillation
of her experience.46
Turner's appetite for new experience also allowed him to embrace the Industrial Revolution. Steam, its most powerful symbol, particularly appealed to
him. He was a painter of trains, steamships, and industrial towns, not of horses
and barges. The new conceptions of nature as the source of power and of
natural forms as expressions of one central force, namely energy, were close to
his own intuition. By the middle of the nineteenth century, energy had become
a central concept in science, and the unity of nature, of which energy is the
core, was the main concern of scientists. Science established, according to Jacob
Bronowski, that the wind, the sea, the steam, and the coal were all created by
the heat of the sun and that heat itself is a form of energy.47 The idea is
contained in a remark made by Turner as he lay dying-"The sun is God."
CONCLUSION
Constable and Turner were exponents of diametrically opposed views of

nature. For Constable, nature was land or landscape; for Turner, landscape was
simply a metaphor for nature, the universal state. The distinction coincided
with a basic division in nineteenth-century science. On one side of the divide
were the morphological or natural sciences whose domain was the world as it
is or as it appears to be. On the other side were the abstract sciences which
searched for general relations or laws and looked on real things as examples of
the general and universal. Constable and the nineteenth-century morphologists
were heirs to the great naturalist tradition of northern Europe whose roots lay
in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. The development of naturalism
in art and in thought rested on an interest in material things and on the growth
of a scientific attitude that recognized their objective reality. To make lifelike
images of rocks, trees, and flowers, painters had first to understand them. As
a result, landscape painting and natural science developed concurrently. The
nineteenth century witnessed both the flowering of the natural sciences and
the flowering of landscape painting. Landscape was the most popular subject
of the visual arts, and naturalism was the chief objective of painters. Constable
and the impressionists who followed are regarded generally as the ultimate
masters of appearances.
For Turner, visible nature was a vehicle for philosophical speculation, not
an object to be revered. "Turner country" was a mental, not a geographical,
region. His spiritual and artistic predecessors were not quiet landscape painters, but disturbing visionaries such as Matthias Grunewald, Albrecht Altdorfer,
and Hieronymus Bosch who tapped instinctive human fears of the uncontrollable forces in nature. Turner's avalanches, deluges, and storms were the
apotheosis of the sublime vision: viewers of Turner's great machines are
gripped by obsessive fears. But Turner's paintings disturbed not only because
they represented nature in threatening forms but also because they demonstrated that beyond the world of the senses there is another that seems indifKenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1979 [originally published in
1949]), p. 187.
47 Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 286.
46
CONSTABLE
AND
TURNER
269
ferent, even inimical, to man. Turner was acquainted with the physical sciences, and consciously or unconsciously he expressed himself in their terms.
He dissolved subjects into color and light, much as science transformed matter
into energy, and by conceiving of a universe composed of vortexes or fields of
force he anticipated findings in physics and astronomy. Furthermore, by presenting man as hostage to such forces, he challenged the teleological viewpoint
and heralded the modern sensibility. Early expressions of the sensibility can
be found in the works of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. Like Turner,
they saw nature as a manifestation of cosmic forces, or fields of energy, indifferent to man.
By looking into the eye of the storm, both literally and metaphorically,
Turner was a bolder, more heroic painter than Constable. One senses that
Turner's truth, however unpalatable, was the more profound. The idea of nature as a garden compatible with man is no longer tenable. Love of nature is
sustained more readily by fine views and prospects than by the worlds of the
microscope and the telescope. Occupied with essences rather than appearances
and universals, not particulars, Turner presented nature as a system of mysterious and often threatening cosmic energies. Constable's view of nature was
more optimistic and more comprehensible than Turner's. Constable's world,
like the geographer's, was the world of ordinary experience, solid and threedimensional. In contrast with Turner and the natural philosophers, Constable
represented that part of the human mind which counteracted the one-sided
working of the spirit of abstraction. Its manifestations were a genuine love of
nature and a consciousness that human beings are diminished if they weaken
the binding connection to the world of real and natural things.

Turner Info

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Turner Info

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

American Geographical Society

Constable, Turner, and Views of Nature in the Nineteenth Century

CONSTABLE, TURNER, AND VIEWS OF NATURE

history of landscape painting is the history of conceptions of nature.

David Bell, The Artist in Wales (London: Harrap, 1957), p. 13.

* MR. REES is an associate professor of geography

Copyright (?) 1982 by the American Geographical Society of New York

In developing approaches to landscape, Constable was the more resolute.

to be "'the greatest wonder in nature." He never tired of hearing descriptions

CONSTABLE AND TURNER

FIG. l-"Valley of Aosta-Snowstorm,

Hazlitt's observation is quoted in Gowing, footnote 3 above, p. 13. Constable's statement is

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Approaching the Coast" (1840-1845) by J. M. W. Turner (The Tate Gallery,

Paintings ostensibly in the same genre, namely landscape, but so different

19 Leslie, footnote 4 above, pp. 318 and 323.

CONSTABLE AND TURNER

with a number of commemorative poems. Constable's response was "a good

All threatening expressions of nature Constable banished from his world.

Hirsh, footnote 17 above, p. 142.

from the steps of the Europa"

.. ... ... .................

Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth" (1842) by J. M. W. Turer (The Tate

his face streaming

shut for a quarter

of an hour. Mrs. Simon, a fellow passenger in the compartment, witnessed the

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Constable and Turner were exponents of diametrically opposed views of

You might also like