Gainsborough House and EA Festival present art historian Nicola Moorby in conversation about her new book Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape (Yale University Press, 2025). As Britain marks the 250th anniversaries of J.M.W. Turner (2025) and John Constable (2026), Moorby revisits the entwined lives and public encounters of these two masters of landscape.

As different in temperament and background as they were in style and career, the two men have historically been portrayed as rivals. According to a famous incident at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1832, Turner added a striking red spot (later shaped into a buoy) to his seascape Helvoetsluys, which hung next to Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. This bold adjustment has traditionally been interpreted as an attention seeking act, designed to upstage Constable who reputedly declared, “He has been here, and fired a gun”. Yet was this a rivalry tinged with respect? Moorby re-examines this and other interactions, and explores how, despite their differences, these two men pushed the boundaries and reshaped the role of landscape art in Britain.

About Nicola Moorby

Nicola Moorby is an art historian and curator specialising in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art. Author of Turner and Constable, she is Curator of Historic British Art, 1790-1850 at Tate, teaches on the Short Courses programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art and lectures widely.