Constable and Turner were the two most prominent landscape painters in nineteenth-century England. Constable painted geographical reality: the tangible world of field, stream, and flower. In his mature and late phases, Turner painted the elements: earth, air, fire, and water. In his search for essences, Turner ignored the conventional components of landscape. The differences between their views
... [Show full abstract] of nature reflected a basic division in nineteenth-century science. On one side of the divide were the morphological sciences that dealt with visible, tangible forms. On the other side were the abstract sciences that searched for general relationships and laws and looked on real things as examples of the general and universal. Constable's affinities were with the morphological sciences, Turner's with the abstract.