There is an art to rivalry. Mastering its rules has, since ancient times, shaped cultural history over millennia.

Around 400 BC, two legendary painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, went head-to-head in a contest to decide once and for all which was the greater craftsman. For his entry, Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes. So convincing was the glistening cluster, according to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, birds swooped down and tried to peck at the beautifully bedewed portrayal of fruit. But when Zeuxis himself attempted to pull open an illusion of a curtain that Parrhasius had depicted with even greater finesse, it was clear who had prevailed. The lesson learned? If you want to win, you must deceive the deceiver.

More than two millennia later, in 1832, the British Romantic painter JMW Turner found himself locked in a similarly intense duel with his contemporary, John Constable, when paintings by both men were hung side by side at an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Constable's vast and ornate painting, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (Waterloo Bridge, from Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817) – which captures with astonishing precision the pomp and pageantry of the Prince Regent's procession as it winds its way to a royal barge – was placed beside a relatively small seascape view of the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys by Turner. Constable had worked on his complex and sprawling canvas for more than a decade. Turner's effort, roughly a third the size of Constable's, seemed barely a sketch by comparison.

Fearing he would be upstaged by Constable's more polished work, which made his own look slapdash and slight, Turner whipped out a brush and jabbed in a single daub of bright red paint to a cresting wave in the forefront of his painting – a strangely transfixing splash of vibrant colour (later worked into a buoy) that added mystery and drama to the seemingly understated scene. With a flick of his wrist, Turner had tipped the balance of the paired paintings in his favour. When Constable clocked Turner's fierce flourish, he famously exclaimed: "he has been here and fired a gun". The lesson learned? In a shootout, the fastest draw wins.

The invigorating artistic tension between the two British Romantic painters is now the focus of a major exhibition at Tate Britain: Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals. Featuring more than 170 paintings and works on paper, including canvases not seen in Britain in over a century, the show explores how a pressurised atmosphere of competition shaped their art, imaginations, and legacies.

Though Turner's view of Helvoetsluys has not made the journey from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Japan, where it now resides, to enable a restaging of the famous face-off with The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, the organisers of the exhibition have summoned instead a pair of works that Constable himself, as a member of the hanging committee a year earlier at the Royal Academy, placed side by side in 1831. That curated showdown, between Turner's Caligula's Palace and Bridge and Constable's own Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, itself constituted a key moment in the artists' decades-long joust, and provoked one critic to muse on the elemental difference between the two: "Turner's fire and Constable's rain".

Born just a year apart (Turner in sooty London in 1775, Constable in a serene Suffolk village in 1776), the........

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