Turner and Constable at Tate Britain shows-off a good old fashioned rivalry that is utterly spell-binding

Part-biography, part a visual diary of their painterly evolution, the exhibition opens with two portraits of the youthful Turner and Constable painted in 1799 (aged 23/24). A town mouse and a country mouse. Turner, the son of a barber born in Covent Garden, and Constable, into a well-to-do family in the sleepy Suffolk village of East Bergholt. A wunderkind, Turner rose quickly up the artistic ranks, a Royal Academician aged just 15; whereas Constable, largely self-taught, didn’t exhibit…