Is this Suffolk or Essex? The River Stour marks the border but has paused its journey through the flat meadows of Dedham Vale and formed a limpid pool; gliding across it on an electric boat operated by the River Stour Trust, my county status remains indeterminate. Nature, though, is unconcerned. Dragonflies skim the surface, fish flicker in refracted sunlight. There are dace, roach and tench down there, and barn owls, otters and water voles are all reported visitors to a waterway that offers a dream vision of how England’s polluted rivers should be.
This section of the Stour is unreal in another way. Millions know it not as an actual place but as a series of paintings by the great romantic painter John Constable, particularly his “six-footer” canvases, most famously The Hay Wain and The White Horse. Today, apart from the blue flash of a kingfisher arrowing towards its lunch, things could hardly be more serene, yet two centuries ago this was where Constable, who was born at East Bergholt on the Suffolk side of the river in 1776, dramatically announced his rivalry to the presiding artistic genius of the age, JMW Turner.
The contest between a painter of cool observation and one of explosive sensations – or, as a contemporary critic put it, “Turner’s fire and Constable’s rain” – is celebrated in the exhibition ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain this winter. To mark the show, I’m exploring Constable country and then Turner’s beloved Margate, the Kent resort where he described the sky as “the loveliest in all Europe”.
Today, Covent Garden-born Turner, whose art is so obviously a forerunner of impressionism and modernity, tends to be favoured over his apparently conservative rival. But Constable’s work could also be turbulent. As The White Horse (coming to the UK for the first time in almost 20 years, on loan to Tate Britain from the Frick Collection in New York) shows, Constable, who would sketch in Suffolk and then paint in London, was the master of ominous grey skies. However, the sky is resolutely blue when I start my walk at the Sun Inn in Dedham, a 17th-century coaching inn where the floors slope with age and my room, appropriately called Constable, looks onto the medieval St Mary’s church.
St Mary’s regularly shows up in Constable’s paintings of the Vale and inside I find The Ascension – a rare religious work of his – hanging above an interior door. Alongside the church is the former grammar school where Constable counted down the minutes until he could be out in the fields again. I follow his lead and walk out into a vale bathed in unseasonal heat, where I encounter a herd of bullocks too dozy to bother interlopers, and a lone white horse, as if Constable were nudging me from beyond the grave.
A line of tumbledown split willows marks the edge of the river that was dug out and embanked after the 1705 River Stour Navigation Act, changes that enabled Constable’s father, the wealthy merchant Golding Constable, to transport and mill grain. Golding was part of the proto-industrialisation of a landscape that we mistakenly regard as the quintessence of rural and coming over the footbridge into Flatford Mill, it’s clear that this was a place where people worked and nature was tamed.
As well as the mill, warehouse and the house the Constable family once lived in, there are locks to hold back tidal flow and, just outside the National Trust tea rooms, a brick-lined dry dock where the grain barges were made and repaired. And then the Hay Wain view, where I find farmer Willy Lott’s house is still on the edge of the river where the cart paused and the horses drank. The Hay Wain was painted in Constable’s London studio and has, until now, never been near the county it depicts. But the famous work will be coming to the Ipswich gallery in 2026, to be shown alongside the artist’s preparatory sketches as part of Colchester and Ipswich Museums’ Constable 250 celebrations. Centuries later, and a few amateur artists working at their sketchbooks aside, the river scene would still be much like the painting if the heavens did not remain so resolutely blue.
The next morning, the heavens are still all wrong. I’ve come south to cloud-covered Thanet in England’s southeastern corner, and the overcast sky that greets me is not the loveliest in all Europe. On the train down, Kent had fluttered with Union flags and the Cross of St George, but Turner, who first came to Margate when he was 11 and painted more than 100 works in the town, liked Kent in part because it was open to the world, and used it to travel to the continent. The jetty that jutted out from the harbour is long gone, but the custom house, which Turner sketched, survives as a visitor centre overlooked by British architect David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary gallery. This collection of steel and glass cubes stands on the spot of Turner’s favourite guest house, where he became romantically entangled with his landlady, Mrs Booth (a tryst memorably portrayed by Timothy Spall and Marion Bailey in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner).
Looking out of the huge sea-facing window on the first floor, I’m getting pretty much the same view, wind turbines aside, that Turner did from his bedroom and nearby, the gallery has hung Turner’s extraordinary oil sketch The Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate, one of his studies for the painting Rockets and Blue Lights. If Turner was a precursor of abstraction, then this work, where Margate seafront becomes an expression of swirling light and colour, shows how.
The painting is here as part of a year of Turner celebrations that began on 16 October and includes events throughout the town. Which is why, after devouring “torched” mackerel at the excellent Dory’s Bistro, I’m in a Victorian terrace with paper and charcoal under the guidance of artist Molly Martin and a book of Turner sketches for inspiration. This is Kindred House, the residential arts space where, from the spring, Martin will be running Turner & Dreamlands Drawing Retreat Weekends. Today, on the greyest of Kent afternoons, my effort is possibly more rain than fire.
Turner and Constable at Tate Britain runs from 27 November 2025 to 12 April 2026
