Turner and Constable: "He has been here and fired a gun"

"Truth" versus "poetry"

John Constable and J. M. W. Turner were born a year apart (1776 and 1775) and spent their entire careers in each other's shadow, exhibited side by side at the Royal Academy for decades. Their contemporaries already set them against each other: the "truth" of the first, devoted to painting the sky and countryside of the Suffolk where he grew up, against the "poetry" of the second, drawn more to dissolving light and historical or maritime subjects. This room, rehung for the exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals (27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026), brings their canvases together to show this opposition directly, wall against wall.

1. The day Turner "fired a gun"

In 1832, on the eve of the Royal Academy's annual exhibition opening, Constable finishes varnishing The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, seen from Whitehall Stairs — a canvas he had worked on for over a decade, hung in a room next to a Turner seascape, Helvoetsluys. That painting is not in this room — it now belongs to a private collection in Japan — but the episode it triggered remains attached forever to the Constable canvas hanging here.

Turner, judging his own painting too grey next to the reds and golds of the Waterloo Bridge canvas, returns to his already-hung work and adds a small, bright red buoy, just enough to make his painting stand out in the middle of the room. Constable, discovering the change, is said to have remarked: "He has been here and fired a gun." Despite this apparent rivalry, the two men would occasionally dine together: Constable would soon after describe a quiet evening spent with Turner, "just the two of us."

2. Constable and the Suffolk "six-footers"

Next to the Waterloo Bridge canvas, The Leaping Horse (exhibited 1825) belongs to what Constable called his "six-footers" — large rural landscape canvases, a scale usually reserved for history painting, that he devotes instead to scenes of the Stour valley in the Suffolk where he grew up. It is a claim in itself: raising the local landscape to the rank of a grand subject, with no need for a mythological or biblical episode to justify it.

3. Turner and the fire he watched with his own eyes

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (exhibited 1835) shows the fire that destroyed the British Parliament on 16 October 1834 — an event Turner watched in person from the bank of the Thames, sketching the scene on the spot before reworking it in the studio. The painting, its flames and their reflection on the water treated almost as pure abstraction, stands at the opposite pole from Constable's near-topographical precision in the neighbouring canvas.

Compare the two approaches in this same room: Constable paints a very real bridge with a wealth of architectural detail, Turner paints a very real disaster while dissolving it almost entirely into light and smoke. These are two answers to the same question — how to paint contemporary England — coming from two temperaments that could not have been more different.

How much time

The room holds around fifty canvases; focus on the two central works of the 1832 anecdote, then let yourself be carried from one sky and light to the next along the walls.

The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (Constable) — 8 minutes.
The Leaping Horse (Constable) — 5 minutes.
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (Turner) — 8 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against Tate's collection and exhibition pages (tate.org.uk) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.

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