On 25 May 1832, John Constable was busy adding the final touches to his masterpiece, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. One of England’s greatest 19th-century landscape artists, he had been working on the painting for more than 10 years and was finally set to reveal it to the world the next day, at the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts’ 64th annual exhibition. Next to his piece hung Helvoetsluys by J M W Turner, an artistic genius in his own right. Watching Constable’s last-minute efforts, Turner decided to add an extra brushstroke of his own: a red buoy floating on the water.
That single daub of red paint against a background of grey sky and sea was so arresting that visitors couldn’t take their eyes off it, certainly not to look at Constable’s painting. It was yet another landmark in the bitter rivalry between the two artists. A year earlier, Constable had used his position in an exhibition committee to have a Turner painting taken down and hung in a side room, replacing it with a painting of his own.
Turner and Constable are not alone in the pantheon of epic rivalries between creative giants. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two of the most brilliant mathematicians and thinkers of the 17th century, laid claim to the development of calculus, the mathematical study of change.
Read more: aeon.co/magazine/psychology/how-rivalry-propels-creativity/
