Tate Britain hung more than 170 works by Turner and Constable side by side in the 250th year of their births, among them the Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.
Tate Britain marked the 250th anniversary of two births with Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals, which ran in Millbank from Thursday 27 November 2025 to Sunday 12 April 2026.
J.M.W. Turner was born in 1775 in the crowded centre of Georgian London and rose early from humble beginnings. He painted blazing sunsets and sublime scenes from his travels.
John Constable, born in 1776, was the son of a wealthy Suffolk merchant and faced a slower climb to acclaim. He returned again and again to a few places he loved, in search of freshness in his treatment of nature.
Critics of their day set their paintings against each other as fire and water. Both men wanted to change landscape painting for the better.
The exhibition hung more than 170 paintings and works on paper. It showed the two side by side, as they often were in their own time.
Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons of 1835 came from the Cleveland Museum of Art, unseen in Britain for over a century. It records the fire of 16 October 1834. Beside it hung Constable’s The White Horse of 1819, lent from The Frick Collection.