“Turner and Constable,” a show at London’s Tate Britain museum that pairs works by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, has become a smash hit, with some 185,000 people attending since its opening in November. Now, it turns out one of those visitors was none other than King Charles himself.
He visited the show on Tuesday, the Tate announced Friday, confirming reports in the British media that he’d been toured around “Turner and Constable” by Amy Concannon, a senior curator of historical British art with the museum network.
According to the Independent, the King let out a “wow” before a painting by Turner, whose seascapes and landscapes move perilously close to abstraction—an avant-garde gesture during the early and mid-19th century, when his career reached its zenith. The work that awed him was The Rising Squall, Hot Wells (1792), which Turner produced when he was still a teenager. It is one of nearly 200 pieces in the Tate show.
The painting was thought to be lost before it arrived at auction last year at Sotheby’s, where it sold for £1.9 million following a failed bid to acquire it by the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Before the auction, the painting resided in Tasmania.
“How many others of these have they got lurking in Australia or something?” King Charles reportedly asked. A jovial Concannon laughed in response, the Independent said.
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson was also on hand during the visit, and had this to say in a statement: “We were honoured to host His Majesty and delighted to see him so deeply engaged in the exhibition. This is a once-in-a-lifetime show, specially staged to mark the 250th anniversaries of both Turner’s and Constable’s births. Since it opened in November we have been overwhelmed by the incredible response from visitors, scholars, artists, and now from the King himself!”
