The jargon of art curation includes the concept of “conversation”, in which pictures are arranged to talk to – or against – each other. By an accident of the gallery calendar, two of London’s biggest picture palaces have created a sort of early-19th-century chat show in which two painters and many paintings converse with revealing nods of the head and a few intriguing shakes.
John Constable (1776-1837) and J M W Turner (1775-1851) have always invited twinning, born a year apart and then, in their artistic afterlives, competing for the position of the most-loved depicter of England. In a Today programme poll of “the greatest painting in Britain” in 2005, Turner’s Fighting Temeraire beat Constable’s Hay Wain into second place, an image of the seas around England trumping a picture of the fields within.
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