Turner and Constable get together in Margate

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Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature
Works from the Tate Collection
5 October 2013 – 5 January 2014

This autumn Turner Contemporary presents its first historical exhibition since the blockbuster ‘Turner and the Elements’ with a major showcase of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and their contemporaries. Bringing together 75 paintings from the Tate collection, the exhibition explores the practice of oil sketching in the landscape in the fullest presentation of oil sketches from the Tate Collection to date. This approach to oil painting became increasingly fashionable during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These rarely shown works, radical for their time, demonstrate artists’ efforts to reflect direct experience of their environment, rather than a concern for careful composition.

The exhibition is organized around six principal landscape themes, reflecting interests and subjects common to artists of the period: sketching from nature; the city; the picturesque; the Thames, rivers and coasts; and rural nature. These themes are explored in the works of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable as well as George Stubbs and John Sell Cotman, among others.

Organized by Compton Verney in Warwickshire, the exhibition is curated by Michael Rosenthal, emeritus professor of art history, University of Warwick, one of the world’s foremost experts on the art of this period, and Anne Lyles, a leading authority on the art of John Constable.

This exhibition appears alongside ‘Connemara’, an exhibition of work by Irish artist Dorothy Cross.  Her work presents a contemporary engagement with nature and the landscape, bringing the themes of ‘Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature. Works from the Tate Collection’ up to date.

The exhibition will later be at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle  from January until May 2014