Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable

"This is a micro-study of how one might interpret the paintings of Turner and Constable and what they’re really trying to do. It’s one of the very few works I’ve ever read about Turner or Constable that addresses the real issues of their work. I suppose I’ve chosen two books about Turner, but Paulson agrees with Lawrence Gowing; i.e., he fundamentally understands that there are these huge problems being addressed by Turner and that his importance as a philosophical thinking artist hasn’t been recognised. He’s seen as a painter of views or a wonderful landscapist, but he’s not seen as someone wrestling with the nature of reality. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the problems that exists in Turner’s work is the fact that so much of it is not very good. What I mean by that is that Turner has such a strong and personal vision that it’s a terrible struggle for him to squeeze it into the genres of painting that were accepted at the time, such as landscape painting or history painting—his versions of those accepted genres often look deeply strange or botched, because what he’s really driving towards is a new form of art where genre is irrelevant and the nature of what the painter himself receives is everything. There’s no one to encourage him to do it, and no one will understand him if he does do it. Ronald Paulson writes very brilliantly about the self-invented nature of his process—how he’s obliged to twist the existing conventions of painting in often weird ways. “Turner is really driving towards a new form of art where genre is irrelevant and the nature of what the painter himself receives is everything.” There’s a painting by Turner called Regulus , exhibited at the Royal Academy. It’s a history painting about a story from classical antiquity in which a Roman general is punished by the Carthaginians by being strapped to a pillar and having his eyelids cut off, so that the sun burns his eyes out. Turner paints this picture—a seething, mad maelstrom of figures. All that you really get from it is this weird miasmic blaring light. A lot of art historians have written in a very misguided way about where Regulus might be in the picture. I think it’s Paulson who points out that, of course, Regulus is you: the viewer. It is Turner saying, ‘I wish I could burn your eyes so deeply so that you can actually see what I’m doing, but as it is I have to ponce about with these history paintings which I have to paint in disguise and it’s just so frustrating’. It’s that sense of the way Turner expresses himself that’s very hard to get at, but Paulson does it very well. He also gets very well at Constable who, for him, is an even more important painter than Turner. He sees them both as the most important painters of the nineteenth century, which arguably they are. Turner invents this new way of seeing what the universe is or might be, and Constable invents the language of Expressionism which is probably even more potent to someone like Jackson Pollock—whether he knew it or not—than the work of Turner. It’s the broken facture, the broken brushstrokes, and these profoundly astonishing pictures of utter emotional desolation after Constable’s wife dies, like Hadleigh Castle . Paulson properly understands what Constable is trying to do. He’s trying to create an art that doesn’t have to have a subject, but that can still have the importance or the emotional vitality of a great altarpiece of the crucifixion. Constable does write about his intentions and his meanings to a much greater extent, although the writings which are his lectures on landscape, given at the Royal Academy late in his life, haven’t really been very well studied. But Paulson writes about them very well. It’s a really really interesting and tightly argued book. It gathers a tremendous amount of really interesting texts together in one book. And it’s not too long—it’s about 220 pages. It’s really terrific. I think it’s appropriate. Freud comes out of the culture of late Romanticism. It’s a culture that turns reality on its head in a very modern way. Suddenly, reality is not something that we experience; what we perceive is our experience of our own interiors. This massive turn from the objective towards the subjective results in some of the theories of Freud. It’s fair enough that Paulson uses some of the theories of somebody who has been produced by the moment that he’s attempting to describe. As it were, he turns the spotlight backwards. And who’s to say that some of the structures of thought that Freud had weren’t in some obscure way created by the art of Romanticism? So, I think it’s fair game. But I find the book most illuminating in parts when he’s relating Constable’s own writing to his painting. Yes. He’s struggling to account for the structures of Constable. He has a perception which is reinforced by some of Constable’s writing such as, for example, the really radical statement that “painting is another word for feeling”. This is a pretty amazing thing for someone to say in 1802, that painting equals feeling. Paulson is trying to find a way of talking about the structure of Constable’s painting that does justice to the notion of painting as an expression of one’s interior existence. What he’s doing is looking at these very prominent things in the foreground of Constable’s paintings—these rotting posts and slimy banks covered with weeds—and he remarks that painting seems almost to dramatise one’s desire to move from this dank, dark, slightly threatening forefront towards the sunlit meadow where there’s usually a church spire. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I made a film about Constable where I argued that this is a structure of painting which mirrors a structure of thought caused perhaps by Constable’s astonishingly vexed courtship of his wife Maria. This took forever because he was a lowly painter; her family was very posh, and they didn’t want him anywhere near her. He was loitering about in the meadows half the time, painting her house from a distance. And there’s this structure of thinking: ‘I wish I wasn’t here but I was there ‘. I think it holds true; it gets particularly more obvious as Constable gets older, where the paintings become ever more desperate, especially after her death. In most people’s eyes, landscape painting was an objective art form and, in England especially, was very closely related to topography. Again, it’s a sort of aristocratic patronage that formed the genre. You would have an artist paint your estate. So, the idea is that if there’s a painting of a landscape, then it must be for that reason, or it must be because it’s picturesque, or it must be because Salisbury Cathedral is important and part of our history. The idea that you would paint a landscape in order to express inner turmoil is as great a shift as you might find in a violin concerto by Mozart compared to a late strings quartet by Beethoven. But I think it’s incontrovertible once you start thinking about it. When I came across that book for the very first time, not many people were writing about art in a way that seemed really to be wrestling with what the art was , why it was so moving, and why it was so interesting. With Paulson’s book, I agree that there’s a bit of intellectual boilerplate to penetrate before you get to the heart of it, but I think it’s very well worth getting out the tin-opener. No. Paulson’s remark just seems autobiographical. I think he responds more viscerally himself to Constable’s work and so he makes it more profound. He argues the case, but maybe he doesn’t quite go as far as Gowing in terms of seeing Turner’s originality. It may be that he doesn’t quite get Turner as well as he could, or he wouldn’t make that remark. If you actually look at Turner’s paintings and you look at Constable’s paintings and you try to imagine what they would look like to someone who was only really used to seeing the other paintings that would have been on the walls at the Royal Academy at that time, or the painting that might have been exhibited in France (perhaps with the exception of Delacroix), some of Constable’s would be utterly bewildering but others like The Cornfield would fit in, and you would think yes, that’s a nice picture. But Turner’s pictures, especially the pictures that he never exhibited—the ones that Gowing writes about so well—would be completely unbelievable. And even with some of the exhibited pictures, such as Rain, Steam and Speed , it’s hard to imagine how anyone in the nineteenth century, let alone Thackeray, who really thought it was fantastic, could have even looked at that picture without wondering about Turner’s sanity. It is so far removed from anything of their experience of painting. In that sense, you would have to say Turner is more extreme because he’s coming to pictorial formulae that are just so far outside the box."