My first attempt to visit the exhibition on Monday 1st December was curtailed due to strike action by Tate Gallery staff.

On my first proper visit today I immediately noticed issues with the gallery lighting.

'The background fluorescent lighting in the galleries is chromatically limited to a few bands across the diffraction grating spectrum!'

The level of ambient light must have an impact on the 'look and feel' of the exhibition and will affect any colour that falls within the spectrum, and by default any colour that is outside the emitted range. The camera was set to electric light which compensates for reduced emission at the blue end of the spectrum.

The first few rooms of the exhibition were very busy but it was noticeably less crowded towards the end of the exhibition. This may be due to fatigue in the audience or the timing of my visit. I had arrived c11:30 am and left at c1:00pm which was an unusually long viewing compared to my other gallery visits!

JMW Turner
Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a Shower
exhibited 1798
oil on canvas
88.9 x 119.4 cm

JMW Turner
Morning amongst the Coniston Fells, Cumberland
exhibited 1798
oil on canvas
122.9 x 89.9 cm

There was a curious, (to me), absence of any indications as to how the paint arrived on the canvas in many of the paintings. The ‘marks’ were the representation of what was depicted often with little added detail. In the Turner paintings this led towards the ethereal appearance of some of the content, in the Constable paintings the equivalent might be strangely sharp high lights.

John Constable
Flatford Mill from the Lock
exhibited 1812
oil on canvas
66 x 92.7 cm

John Constable
The Mill Stream c.1810-14
oil on canvas
71.1 x 91.5 cm

Low reflection glass meant that there were tell tale green reflections in some of the views and I noticed that a few of the paintings were behind normal glass. The low level of lighting required for the works on paper meant that I found myself peering into the gloom of some of the darker passages of the paintings. Here I did find some interesting ‘grounding’ of the landscapes as in what might have been at the artist’s feet when making the sketch for the composition, or even, in some cases the actual painting.

JMW Turner
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited 1812
oil on canvas
146 x 237.5 cm

JMW Turner
The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl
exhibited 1823
oil on canvas
145.4 x 237.5 cm

(detail)

The paintings should really be viewed in daylight, I am sure. The size of some of the highly gilded frames was quite extraordinary in some cases which means that cropped photographs appear domestic rather than having ‘grand’ proportions. I’ll have to research the sizes as The Tate does not offer that information on the wall labels. Fortunately details of works from the Tate Collection are available online.

John Constable
Flatford Mill ('Scene on a Navigable River')
exhibited 1817
oil on canvas
100 x 130 cm

(detail)

John Constable
Stratford Mill
exhibited 1820
oil on canvas
127 x 182.9 cm

I am wondering about the colour values in the paintings by both artist’s. Out of curiosity I have downloaded images of all the paintings via Wikipedia, mainly the Tate Gallery Collection site. I can see that colour saturation and tonal ranges are an issue in some of the images.

The limitations of available pigments should be considered in comparison with the earliest European paintings as in the 'Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300 - 1350' exhibition.

JMW Turner
The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire
exhibited 1817
oil on canvas
170 x 239 cm

JMW Turner
Caligula's Palace and Bridge
exhibited 1831
oil on canvas
137.2 x 246.4 cm

JMW Turner
Norham Castle, Sunrise c.1845
oil on canvas
90.8 x 121.9 cm

I shall visit this exhibition again. I only really looked closely at the eleven works illustrated here and felt that the exhibition was 'too large' for comfortable viewing. The sketches and other peripheral material looks as if it is really fascinating but initiall I wanted to 'get to grips' with the main paintings.

I had set out with a vague notion that there was a Constable painting in the exhibition that might have some clues about the use of colour, particularly a windsor green but on walking around the exhibition when I arrived it was clear that memory had played a trick and that the imagined painting was not present.

I spent time looking at Flatford Mill and Dedhame Lock and Mill and concluded that the colour elements were applied quite broadly and then articulated with local detail. I will go back and look at the Turner paintings with this in mind as I had begun to think that the artists methods were actually very similar even if their subjects were quite different.

John Constable
Flatford Mill ('Scene on a Navigable River')
exhibited 1817
oil on canvas
100 x 130 cm

(detail) showing limited colour values and overlaid tonal elements including intense highlights.

John Constable
Dedham Lock and Mill
Exhibited 1818
oil on canvas
71 x 90.5 cm

I began to find some compositional constants in these paintings with a large group of trees sliding off into a distant vista being the most evident!

The notion that the very specific moment in time was the subject of the paintings without further storytelling is very interesting.

(detail)

John Constable
Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds
exhibited 1823
oil on canvas
87.6 x 111.8 cm

Making the cathedral the subject of the series of paintings may be seen as a gesture towards a conformity at a distance.

I will maybe look up all the images of the cathedral for comparison.

While some of the trees in other paintings seem somewhat idealised the central group in the Stratford Mill painting seem to be somewhat unruly.

I see the colour wash notion quite strongly in this composition.

John Constable
Stratford Mill
exhibited 1820
oil on canvas
127 x 182.9 cm

After the over warm gallery there were stack contrasts out on John Islip Street and a chilling breeze.