Last year was a big one for Turner, with exhibitions around the country marking the 250th anniversary of his birth. Now it’s the turn of Constable, who was born a year later, and anyone who missed the recent exhibition at Tate Britain that compared and contrasted the two painters’ work can visit Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, where paintings by the two masters are hung alongside work by Thomas Gainsborough (25 April–11 October). ‘I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree,’ Constable said early in his career, and this exhibition traces the influence of not only Gainsborough but also Antonio Joli, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Alexander Cozens on Constable. Among the highlights are Gainsborough’s Landscape with Cattle, a Young Man Courting a Milkmaid (early 1770s), which has not been on view in the UK for more than 70 years; Turner’s Abergavenny Bridge, which was last seen in public in the year of its creation, 1799; and Constable’s The Leaping Horse (1825), which Lucian Freud once called ‘the greatest painting in the world’.
Find out more from the Gainsborough’s House website.
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