15. January 2025 20:00
Nicola Moorby
Venue
VHS Münster, Raum 111
Aegidimarkt 3
48143 Münster
As their 250th anniversaries approach, this is the story of Britain’s best-known artists, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
Born just one year apart, these two creative geniuses lived and worked in parallel, transforming the art of landscape during the early nineteenth century.
Between them they raised the status of the genre, turning it into a powerful expression of British cultural life. Yet it would be difficult to imagine a more different pair of individuals. Respectively hailing from the city and the country, biographical contrasts in background, upbringing and personality shaped world views that resulted in profoundly varying approaches to art. Posterity has remembered them as rivals, pitted against one another in a battle for supremacy. This lecture sets them head-to-head in an imagined contest and examines how their differing approaches fared in the competitive arena of London’s Royal Academy. We will examine their different techniques for sketching from nature and witness the final showdown of their most famous paintings. But were they really enemies or friends, colleagues or comrades? And who can be said to have had the greatest influence on modern art movements? Find out with Nicola Moorby, art historian and curator.
Nicola Moorby is an art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Previously independent, in 2025 she will be joining Tate Britain as Curator, British Art 1790-1850. She is an experienced lecturer and regularly teaches for the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has curated a number of exhibitions and has published widely, including as co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing, 2010) and as a major contributor to Tate’s online catalogue of the Turner Bequest. Her new book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life and Landscape will be published by Yale University Press in March 2025.
15. January 2025 20:00
Nicola Moorby
Venue
VHS Münster, Raum 111
Aegidimarkt 3
48143 Münster
As their 250th anniversaries approach, this is the story of Britain’s best-known artists, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
Born just one year apart, these two creative geniuses lived and worked in parallel, transforming the art of landscape during the early nineteenth century.
Between them they raised the status of the genre, turning it into a powerful expression of British cultural life. Yet it would be difficult to imagine a more different pair of individuals. Respectively hailing from the city and the country, biographical contrasts in background, upbringing and personality shaped world views that resulted in profoundly varying approaches to art. Posterity has remembered them as rivals, pitted against one another in a battle for supremacy. This lecture sets them head-to-head in an imagined contest and examines how their differing approaches fared in the competitive arena of London’s Royal Academy. We will examine their different techniques for sketching from nature and witness the final showdown of their most famous paintings. But were they really enemies or friends, colleagues or comrades? And who can be said to have had the greatest influence on modern art movements? Find out with Nicola Moorby, art historian and curator.
Nicola Moorby is an art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Previously independent, in 2025 she will be joining Tate Britain as Curator, British Art 1790-1850. She is an experienced lecturer and regularly teaches for the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has curated a number of exhibitions and has published widely, including as co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing, 2010) and as a major contributor to Tate’s online catalogue of the Turner Bequest. Her new book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life and Landscape will be published by Yale University Press in March 2025.