Poet Stanley Plumly gives us a remarkable double portrait of two disparate artists who came to be regarded as Britain's supreme landscape painters of the Romantic period. John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were almost exact contemporaries, each galvanized by a life-changing tragedy: for Constable it was the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their works took on new power thereafter—Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils—and Plumly lyrically observes how each sought the transcendent aesthetic of the sublime in the terrible beauty of the world.

"Plumly's eye for detail and eloquent powers of description make this book a significant work of art history."—Publishers Weekly