John Constable (1776 –
1837)
In his youth,
Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk and
Essex countryside, which was to become the subject of a large proportion of his
art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am
grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows,
old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things."
Entering the
Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical
dissections, and studied and copied old masters. Among works that particularly
inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude
Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob van Ruisdael . He also read widely among
poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist. By 1803, he
was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy.
His early style
has many qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of
light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the old
masters he had studied. To make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which
he found dull, though he executed many fine portraits.
From 1809, his
childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love.
John and Maria's marriage was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a
honeymoon tour of the south coast. The sea stimulated Constable to develop new
techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. At the same time, a
greater emotional range began to be expressed in his art.
Although he had
scraped an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his
first important canvas, The White Horse, which led to a series of
"six footers", as he called his large-scale paintings. That year he
was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. In 1821 he showed The Hay
Wain (a view from Flatford Mill) at the Academy's exhibition.
In his lifetime,
Constable sold only 20 paintings in England, but in France he sold more than 20
in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel
internationally to promote his work, writing: "I would rather be a poor
man [in England] than a rich man abroad.”
After the birth of
their seventh child in 1828, Maria fell ill and died at the age of 41. He cared
for his seven children alone for the rest of his life.
He was elected to
the Royal Academy in 1829, at the age of 52. In 1831 he was appointed Visitor
at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students. He
began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which
were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of lectures Constable
proposed a three-fold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well
as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear
comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.
In 1835, his last
lecture to students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and
called the Academy the "cradle of British art", was "cheered
most heartily". He died from heart failure.
Constable quietly
rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their
imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told
Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I
try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".
Although Constable
produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture
market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of
on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method. He was never satisfied
with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two
days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a
tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of
art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.’
Constable painted
many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the
composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their
free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue
to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches of The
Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example, convey a vigour and
expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects.
Constable's
watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge,
1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest
watercolours ever painted.
In addition to the
full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of
landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of
atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes
apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London.
The sketches
themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the
open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken
brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages,
creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape. One
of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is Seascape
Study with Rain Cloud, painted about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with
slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea.
Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in Salisbury
Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831.
To the sky studies
he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather
conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was
"the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of
sentiment" in a landscape painting.
Constable once
wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found
under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth
picking up". He could never have imagined how influential his honest
techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired the Barbizon School and
the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.
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