CONSTABLE, John

Constable’s sceptical attitude to the Old Masters resulted not in rejection but in a selective reinterpretation, as in the upright view of his native landscape, Dedham Vale, painted in 1802 as a tribute to a painting by Claude, Hagar and the Angel, then owned by Constable’s early mentor Sir George Beaumont (and now in the National Gallery, London). Constable recast the scene in a fresh, sparkling palette of greens and golds and with a light touch with the brush.

This view depicts Dedham Vale, with the River Stour in flood, as seen from the grounds of Old Hall, East Bergholt. It is handled with a degree of ‘finish’ and an attention to the work of the Old Masters, such as Claude Lorraine, Albert Cuyp and Thomas Gainsborough, that is typical of Constable’s practice in this period.

This picture is one of Constable’s oil sketches which are bravura displays of a thickly loaded brush or palette knife, worked at speed in rich colours, setting out bold masses and forms as well as transient effects of weather or time.

Constable’s rural realism belongs to the tradition of the composed landscape - created in the studio after studies in oil done from nature. Helmington Dell is the sketch of a motif repeated by the artist in two finished pictures.

Constable is one of Britain’s greatest artists,He sought inspiration directly from nature for his landscape painting. In accordance with his desire for pure and unaffected representation, calm, almost realistic depictions of scenes in his native Suffolk form the larger part of his work.

His careful studies of nature are evident in this painting, which he executed around 1809. Although the scene is so still and there is no trace of sentimentality or theatricality, the painting is full of flickering light despite the cool objectivity, and this anticipates the Impressionists.

Constable’s atmospheric depictions of the natural scene, rendered in loose, unconventional brushwork, excited Delacroix and G�ricault, and later influenced the masters of Barbizon and even the Impressionists.

Constable in his day was the preeminent painter of the English landscape, and although he never achieved the overwhelming success of his contemporary Turner, his naturalist’s vision had far greater impact on the history of 19th-century painting. In 1822 John Fisher, bishop of Salisbury, commissioned from Constable a view of Salisbury Cathedral. The bishop rejected the canvas, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, because it had a stormy sky, and the artist painted a highly finished variant with a bright sky in 1826. The latter is now in the Frick Collection, New York. The figures on the left are the bishop and his wife.

This oil sketch is the fifth of six paintings of the cathedral seen from the south that Constable produced between 1820 and 1826. It is a full-scale preparatory sketch for a finished work in the Frick Collection.

Constable did this painting on commission from his friend, the Bishop of Salisbury, who also stipulated the point of view and framing of the scene. The Anglican dignitary is depicted with his wife in the left foreground, out for a stroll and pointing to the cathedral.

This oil sketch is a preparatory work for one of John Constable’s most celebrated masterpieces, now in the Tate, London.

For some of his large canvases Constable painted full-size oil sketches, The Leaping Horse being an example. Here he has tried to freeze a sudden action - the leap of a barge horse over a cattle barrier on the Stour towpath. But to the modern observer his own description of the picture, written shortly before it was ready for the 1825 Academy exhibition - ‘calm & exhilarating, fresh & blowing’ - applies more happily to the sketch; the greatest sufferer in the finished canvas is the sky, which has lost its bubbling clouds.

Especially in his last years, after 1830, Constable’s work underwent a marked change, and mood appears as a vehicle of meaning, which may possibly ascribed to Turner’s influence.

This view was taken from a window Constable’s nearby Hampstead home in the 1820s.

The view is of the millpond at Flatford on the River Stour. Flatford Mill was a watermill for grinding corn, operated by the Constable family for nearly a hundred years. It still survives and is about a mile from Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt, Suffolk. The house on the left also survives; in Constable’s time it was occupied by tenant farmer Willy Lott.

The title, The Hay Wain, refers to the wooden wagon (wain) used for transporting cut and dried meadow grass (hay). The empty wagon is making its way through the shallow water to cross to the meadow on the other side where haymakers are at work.

Although the painting evokes a Suffolk scene, it was created in the artist’s studio in London. Working from a number of open-air sketches made over several years, Constable then made a full-size preparatory oil sketch to establish the composition before painting the final picture.

John Constable’s father was a wealthy Suffolk miller. Constable’s truthfulness to nature and devotion to his native scene have passed into legend. Less widely known, however, is his biographer’s report that it was seeing Claude’s Hagar and the Angel (now in the National Gallery, London) and watercolours by Girtin which first provided him with ‘pictures that he could rely on as guides to the study of nature.’ Ruisdael, Rubens, Wilson and Annibale Carracci were among other ‘reliable guides’ whose work he copied as a young man. He also learned from contemporary painters, never forgetting the advice given him by Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy: ‘Always remember, sir, that light and shadow never stand still…in your skies… always aim at brightness…even in the darkest effects…your darks should look like the darks of silver, not of lead or of slate.’

Constable’s youthful exclamation, ‘There is room enough for a natural painture [i.e. style of painting]’, must be understood not as the outpouring of a ‘natural painter’ but as the proclamation of an aspiring student struggling for proficiency in the language of art, which shaped his deepest feelings before he could give expression to them.

The Hay Wain, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821 and at the British Institution in 1822 under the title Landscape: Noon, was one of the big ‘six-footers’ on which Constable worked in the winters in London from sketches and studies made in the country in summer. The harvest wagon of the modern title was copied from a drawing made by John Dunthorne, Constable’s childhood friend and assistant, and sent at Constable’s request from Suffolk. The view is of farmer Willy Lott’s cottage on a mill stream of the River Stour near Flatford Mill, of which Constable’s father had the tenancy. A full-scale sketch for the picture is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this final version, Constable omitted a figure on horseback at the edge of the stream, substituting a barrel that he later painted out (but which is beginning to show through).

In this ‘selecting and combining’ from ‘some of the forms and evanescent effects of nature’ Constable sought an ‘unaffected truth of expression’ without the loss of poetry. He laboured ‘almost fainting by the way’ to preserve the sparkle of sketches in these large paintings worked over for many months in the studio. The Hay Wain, that best-loved icon of the English countryside, was admired by Constable’s closest friends but did not meet with success at the London exhibitions. He sold it in 1823 with two other pictures to an Anglo-French dealer who exhibited them in the 1824 Salon in Paris. There at last Constable’s achievement was understood. A cast of the gold medal awarded to Constable by King Charles X of France is incorporated in the picture’s frame.

For some of his large canvases Constable painted full-size oil sketches, The Leaping Horse being an example. Here he has tried to freeze a sudden action - the leap of a barge horse over a cattle barrier on the Stour towpath. But to the modern observer his own description of the picture, written shortly before it was ready for the 1825 Academy exhibition - ‘calm & exhilarating, fresh & blowing’ - applies more happily to the sketch; the greatest sufferer in the finished canvas is the sky, which has lost its bubbling clouds.

The English artist John Constable is one of the greatest of European landscape painters, whose handling of light and colour was admired by the masters of Barbizon and the Impressionists, among others.

The painting in Madrid represents the locks of Flatford Mill on the Stour. Constable knew the place from childhood, because his father owned the mill. Every work the artist exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1812 to 1825 included a view of the Stour Valley.

Constable made several studies outdoors for his large-format pictures. In preparation for The Lock, he travelled from his residence in Hampstead outside London to Dedham in spring 1823. The finished paintings never adhered slavishly to such sketches, but rather modified natural appearances in the service of the picture’s message.

The principal effect of the composition derives from the landscape scene itself, which is characterized above all by the treatment of light. The light seems to fluctuate before our eyes, analogously to the meteorological interplay in the sky In his differentiation of lighting effects under clouds of varying density Constable relied largely on seventeenth-century Dutch Baroque landscapes, especially those of Jacob van Ruisdael. The present painting employs the identical technique of representing an agitated water surface by means of white impasto.

Constable was the son of a prosperous mill-owner in Suffolk, a county whose scenery became central to his work. Though he took painting lessons in Suffolk, he was largely self-taught. In 1795, he went to London and he entered the Royal Academy schools in 1799. As a student he copied Old Master landscapes, especially those of Jacob van Ruisdael.

Though deeply impressed by the work of Claude Lorrain and the watercolours of Thomas Girtin, Constable believed the actual study of nature was more important than any artistic model. He refused to “learn the truth second-hand.” To a greater degree than any other artist before him, Constable based his paintings on precisely drawn sketches made directly from nature. His early work also included portraits and some religious pictures, but from 1820 onwards he devoted himself almost exclusively to landscape painting. His subjects were found in the parts of England that he knew best, mainly Suffolk and Essex, and also Brighton.

Constable’s pencil drawings are far less well-known than his oil sketches and large scale, highly finished paintings, but as intimate studies created in the open air they provide compelling evidence of how he immersed himself in study of the English countryside. This fine example, which is enlivened by details such as the abandoned barges and horse drinking at the water’s edge, illustrates the breezy naturalism and compositional clarity he was able to convey, even in such modest works.

Constable is chiefly known for his depictions of the Stour Valley in his native Suffolk. But he also undertook visits to other parts of England, and in October 1835 travelled to Worcester to deliver three lectures on the history of landscape painting for a local learned society. In a letter to the printmaker David Lucas he declared: ‘Who would ever have thought of my turning Methodist preacher, that is, a preacher on “Method” - but I shall do good, to that art for which I live.’ He stayed on for a few more days, making drawings, including this study, along the river Severn. It proved to be the last such tour he made.

Constable met Maria Bicknell in 1800, when she was thirteen. She was the granddaughter of the rich Dr Rhudde, Rector of East Bergholt, Constable’s native village. In 1811 they became engaged, but Maria’s father, Solicitor to the Admiralty, and especially her grandfather the rector, opposed her union to ‘a man below her in point of fortune, and…without a profession’. Constable’s friend and biographer C.R. Leslie reports that for five years Maria was treated ‘as if she were a boarding-school girl in danger of falling a prey to a fortune-hunter’. At 29, however, ‘she felt entitled to determine for herself a matter which so entirely affected her own happiness.’ They were married on 2 October 1816 at St Martin’s Church by Constable’s friend the Reverend John Fisher. Fisher invited them to stay with his wife of three months and himself in Osmington near Weymouth, ‘The country here is wonderfully wild and sublime, and well worth a painter’s visit.’

There is some disagreement over whether this painting of Weymouth Bay is a sketch painted out of doors during Constable’s honeymoon, or a later work prepared for sale on the basis of sketches made at this time and left unfinished. It seems so fresh and spontaneous that most viewers have wished it to be a direct record of Constable’s visit, his easel set a little west of Redcliff Point, facing Jordan Hill and Furzy Cliff on a gusty October day. The reddish brown of the priming shows through the blue sky and water, lending a warm glow to the landscape, which is framed and ‘pushed back’ by a promontory on the right and rocks and pebbles at the lower edge, painted freely but in greater detail than the rest. The glory of Weymouth Bay, however is the cloudscape: clouds rising from the horizon to form the ‘vault of the sky’, that pictorial discovery of Dutch seventeenth-century marine painting.

Constable’s early employment in his father’s mill must indeed have alerted him to the appearance and behaviour of clouds. It is all the more moving, therefore, to find that in his youthful exertions to train himself in art he had sat down and carefully copied and labelled a series of cloud patterns published in 1785 for the use of his pupils by Alexander Cozens, a landscape painter and drawing master. There are no more truthful studies of clouds than those by Constable, but even the observant windmiller had to acquire a vocabulary of representation before setting them down in paint.