worldof fire and brimstone beckons. And I
can’t stop thinking of how two painters
represented two diferent directions for the
country. I love Constable because he seems
to see so much about our human nature and
about nature itself. Increasingly, I find Turner
bombastic and lacking anything other than a
good business hand, like the current crop of
billionaires. They know what sells and I can’t
help but feel jaundiced as I look at Turner the
merchant. But 200 years ago, we started
moving away from Constable and towards
Turner and his merchant capitalist belief in
a future of factories and globalism.And possibly, at the end of it, a destroyed
world laid to waste by industry and urbanism.
Recently, I have been researching the
decades before the French Revolution for a
new book. From 1774-1776, Anne-Robert-
Jacques Turgot was the comptroller-general
of finance in France, who wanted to bring
about all manner of radical reforms. He saw
that vested interests were avoiding taxes and
dipping into the public purse big time – that
the poor were getting it in the neck. Turgot
tried to bring in economic reform but was
sacked by Louis XVI, who originally took him
on. Too many interests around Louis didn’t
want any reform because it would hit
their pockets.
So, 23 years, two months and two days after
Turgot was sacked, the French Revolution
began and blew away the old regime. Turgot’s
last word to the King was about foolish King
Charles I, who – in the previous century – had
his head removed in England. Sure enough,
Louis shared the same fate with QueenMarie Antoinette because these
short-sighted rulers couldn’t get their act
together and pushed and pushed on, ignorant
of their own end.
Similarly, you can’t expect the big
players of today to do anything other than
push us (inevitably) towards mass
destruction. And this summer of
unprecedented levels of fires and heat – from
Japan to Sweden – may well be a harbinger
of future troubles. Weather is going to become
a bigger and bigger issue in our lives as
extremes run together. As I sit in my wet
Devon field it seems no diferent from similar
fields of my childhood.
When Constable and Turner
were vying for the afections of the
painted picture, the world’s
population had only recently
reached one billion. Now we are
over 7.6 billion and a lot of
destruction of nature and climate
changing activity has happened
since. Turgot, poor chap, never
implemented any of his reforms
and subsequently the French
Revolution unleashed many of the
changes that led – for good
and ill – to the modern
nature-murdering and
people-murdering world.
Turgot may have vanished
out of popular history, although Margaret
Thatcher tried some of his recipes in the 20th
century; but not to head of a revolution.
Rather, she seemed intent on creating a better
world for business ( but that’s another
argument). Turgot got so lost in popular
consciousness that when I lived in Rue Turgot
in Paris in the Sixties no-one could tell me
who he was. It took some digging to find out
how Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to
take the steam out of things and prevent the
modern world from happening in the way it
did. A diferent, less oppressive capitalism
might well have saved us from the
possible coming fires, floods and freaks
of weather.
But hey, that’s the future! Let’s just
concentrate on our current angers as we seem
to do with great insistence.John Bird is the founder and Editor in Chief
of The Big Issue. @johnbirdswords
[email protected]B
ecause I’m sitting in a wet Devon field
camping, and the trees and grass
are abundant, I feel I might have
wandered into a Constable painting. One
thing you get with John Constable is fecund
nature, green and alluring, sparkling in rain
or in light sun. The earlier oppressive sun
seems to have abated, taking fire with it; or
so I hope.
Certainly, we didn’t look like Constable a
few weeks ago when Britain sizzled. We
looked baked. The weather was reflected in
rising knife crime rates and the hot fights
around Brexit and racism. A sense of
meltdown was in the air.
Artistically, Constable seems in
opposition to JMW Turner. And
it feels like we have passed through
a Turner summer with his heavy
reds, and – at times – fire, from
industry and modernity. Now
we’re in Constable weather and a
time of mellow fruitfulness.
Hopefully, the debates and
disagreements will not be quite so
hot, and reasonableness will be
sought rather than blood-spilling.
Is it possible to be both a
Turner lover as well as a Constable
lover? Or is it a divide between the
tranquil and the troubled? The
verbose and natural. The loud age
of machinery and urbanism, and the country
lane, the farm and the canal. In a way, the
earlier industrialisation of the agrarian world
is represented by Constable, and the empire
of commerce and Victorian splendour
represented by Turner; although Turner
( being a clever merchant-painter) stuck in
all manner of subjects, including nature and
the tranquil.
But step outside the art history arguments
and what you have is two diferent directions
for Britain represented 200 years ago by two
painters. Constable, a corn merchant’s son
from Sufolk, captured the natural world.
Meanwhile, Turner, a Covent Garden boy,
presented a vision of bold, hot,
weather-changing industrialisation. One a
good middle-class boy, the other, the son of a
barber and wig maker.
This seems to me a summer of Turner and
Constable. Recent articles about the
vanishing polar icecaps and thawing
Photo: (Photo by Anthony Devlin/Getty Images)permafrost gives me the willies as a future
JOHN BIRD
A fiery summer foretells
a grim picture of our future
Asummer of extremes – the wildfires which swept through the UK, including this
one in Greater Manchester, have been refl ected in the state of the nation