DIFFERENT STROKES

With a new exhibition celebrating rival artists Turner and Constable at the Tate Britain, Michael Hodges explores the parts of England that inspired some of their greatest works

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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