John Constable

gigatos | May 29, 2022

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Summary

John Constable (East Bergholt, Suffolk, England, June 11, 1776 – March 31, 1837) was an English landscape painter. The preferred subject of his works was the Suffolk region, more specifically the Dedham Valley, which is why the area is known as “Constable”s country”. His most famous work is The Hay Cart.

He was the second son of Golding and Ann Constable. Golding was a wealthy miller who owned two mills and was a very prominent member of his community. John attended some classes, although he was basically self-taught. The education of his older brother, who had a certain mental deficiency, was centered on following in his father”s footsteps, so when he finished school he began to work in the family business, which the younger brother would eventually take over.

Training and beginnings

He began drawing at a very young age in his village under the influence of John Dunthorne, a local plumber and glazier, whose friendship he cultivated throughout his life. In 1795, John Constable arrived in London to work as a topographical draughtsman. There he was a sporadic pupil of John Thomas Smith, who in 1797 published Remarks on Rural Scenery. But he returned to his village where he kept his father”s accounts from 1797 to 1799. In 1797, he befriended the Fisher family, whose house in Salisbury he would visit on several occasions. The eldest Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, eventually commissioned him to paint a view of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1799, encouraged by his first patron, the Duke of Dysart, he persuaded his father to allow him to study at the Royal Academy in London.

Among the authors who most inspired him during this early period were Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob Ruysdael. In 1802, he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy. From then on he exhibited regularly, progressing rather slowly.

In the same year of his first exhibition at the Royal Academy, he refused to become a drawing teacher at the military college of Marlow (now Sandhurst), as he had decided to become a professional landscape painter. In these early years, he devoted himself especially to working with watercolor, chalk and pencil, taking a special interest in drawing, depicting paths, cottages and bridges in the vicinity of his surroundings. Gradually, his picturesque vision of nature gave way to a more naturalistic painting that moved away from stereotypes. By then, he was already in the practice of painting outdoors. Although his father supported him, to earn some money he dedicated himself to portraiture, copying the classics and religious painting.

In 1802, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he expressed his determination to become a professional landscape painter:

For the past two years I have been running after pictures and looking for the second-hand truth … I have not endeavored to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have tried to make my performances look like the work of other men … There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravado, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.

His early style is reflected in his mature work, including the freshness of light, color and texture. It also reveals the compositional influence of the old masters he had studied, particularly Claude Lorrain. Constable”s usual subjects, which were scenes of ordinary, everyday life, were not fashionable at the time, as more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins were sought after. He made occasional trips further afield.

In 1803, he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. In April, he spent nearly a month aboard the East Indiaman Coutts, visiting southeastern ports while sailing from London to Deal before departing for China.

He is considered one of the first to paint landscapes outdoors; he decided to start doing so in 1810. Constable adopted the routine of spending the winter in London and painting in East Bergholt in the summer. In 1811, he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape would inspire some of his best paintings.

In 1806, he was in the Lake District, where he made a series of watercolors in the style of Thomas Girtin. He then met the poet Wordsworth. He told his friend and biographer, Charles Leslie, that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirit, and Leslie wrote:

His nature was peculiarly social and he could not be satisfied with a landscape, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human associations. It needed towns, churches, farms and cottages.

To make ends meet, Constable also turned to portraiture, which he found boring, although he produced some very good ones. He also painted occasional religious pictures but, according to John Walker, “Constable”s inability as a religious painter cannot be overstated.”

Another source of income was painting country houses. In 1816, Major General Francis Slater-Rebow commissioned him to paint his country house, Wivenhoe Park, in Essex. The major general also commissioned a smaller painting of the fishing lodge in the grounds of Alresford Hall, now in the National Gallery of Victoria. Constable used the money from these commissions for his wedding to Maria Bicknell.

In 1819 he traveled to Venice and Rome, where he became acquainted with the classicist landscapes of Claude Lorrain and the recreations of Nicolas Poussin. In the same year, he was appointed associate member of the Royal Academy. From this time on he frequented Hampstead, where, in 1821 and 1822, he made a series of studies of clouds, noting the exact time and date they were made and, often, even the weather.

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Marriage

From 1809, his childhood friendship with Maria Elizabeth Bicknell developed into a deep and mutual love. Their marriage in 1816, when Constable was 40 years old, was rejected by Maria”s grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, as he considered the Constables inferior to them socially and threatened Maria with disinheritance. Mary”s father, Charles Bicknell, solicitor to King George IV and the Admiralty, was reluctant for Mary to give up her inheritance. Mary pointed out to John that a penniless marriage would detract from any chance she had of a career in painting. Golding and Ann Constable, while approving of the marriage, offered no possibility of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure. But after their deaths, Constable inherited a fifth of the family business.

After five years of opposition from her father, the marriage of John and Maria was celebrated in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields church (with Fisher officiating) was followed by a period at Fisher”s vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast. The sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of bright colors and lively brushstrokes. At the same time, he began to express a greater emotional range in his art.

Three weeks before his marriage, Constable revealed that he had begun work on his most ambitious project to date. In a letter to Maria Bicknell from East Bergholt, he wrote:

I am now working here on a large painting that I had contemplated for the next exhibition.

The painting was Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River), the largest canvas he had worked on to date, setting the working scene on the River Stour, and the largest he would ever complete largely outdoors. Moreover, it would be the largest he would ever complete largely outdoors. Constable was determined to paint on a larger scale, his aim being not only to attract more attention at exhibitions but also, it seemed, to project his ideas about landscape on a scale more in keeping with the achievements of the classical landscape painters he so admired. Although Flatford Mill failed to find a buyer when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, its fine and intricate execution attracted much praise, which encouraged Constable to move on to the even larger canvases that were to follow.

They had seven children. It was an exceptionally happy marriage, darkened only by the woman”s failing health. In an attempt to improve it, they went to Brighton in 1824. There Constable studied atmospheric changes, what he called “the chiaroscuro of nature,” that is, the gradation of shades of natural light.

Monumental landscapes (the “six feet”)

Although he managed to earn an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first major canvas, The White Horse, described by Charles Robert Leslie as “the most important picture Constable ever painted.” The painting (without the frame) was sold for the substantial price of 100 guineas to his friend John Fisher, which ultimately brought Constable a level of financial freedom he had never known before. The White Horse marked an important turning point in Constable”s career; its success led to his election as an Associate Fellow of the Royal Academy and resulted in a series of six monumental landscapes depicting narratives on the River Stour, known as the “six feet” (so called because of their scale). Viewed as “the most forceful landscapes produced in 19th century Europe,” and for many they are the defining works of the artist”s career. The series also includes Stratford Mill, 1820 (View over the Stour near Dedham, 1822 (and The Leaping Horse, 1825 (Royal Academy of Arts, London).

The following year, his second six-foot Stratford Mill was exhibited. One critic described it as, “a more accurate aspect of nature than any picture we have ever seen painted by an Englishman.” The painting was a success, the buyer again being the loyalist John Fisher, who bought it for 100 guineas, a price he himself considered too low. Fisher bought the painting for his lawyer and friend, John Pern Tinney. Tinney loved the painting so much that he offered Constable another 100 guineas to paint a complementary picture, an offer the artist did not accept.

In 1821, his most famous painting The Hay Wagon was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition. Although it failed to find a buyer, it was seen by some important people of the time, including two Frenchmen, the artist Théodore Géricault and the writer Charles Nodier. According to the painter Eugène Delacroix, Géricault returned to France “rather stunned” by Constable”s painting, while Nodier suggested that French artists should also look to nature rather than relying on trips to Rome for inspiration. It was eventually bought, along with View on the Stour near Dedham, by the Anglo-French dealer John Arrowsmith, in 1824. Constable added a small painting of Yarmouth Pier to the deal, selling for a total of £250. Both paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year, where they caused a sensation, and the hay wagon received a gold medal from Charles X. Critics praised it, regarding it as an avant-garde example of naturalistic landscape depiction.

Of Constable”s color, Delacroix wrote in his journal, “What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to all tones.” Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 Scio Massacre after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith”s Gallery, which, he said, had done him much good.

Various distractions meant that The Lock was not completed in time for the 1823 exhibition, leaving Salisbury Cathedral, from Bishop”s Grounds, as the artist”s main contribution. This may have occurred after Fisher sent Constable the money for the painting. This helped him out of a financial difficulty and prompted him to finish the painting. Consequently, The Lock was exhibited the following year with more fanfare and sold for 150 guineas on the first day of the exhibition. The Lock is the only vertical landscape in the Stour series and the only six-footer of which Constable painted more than one version. A second version now known as the “Foster version” was painted in 1825 and kept by the artist to send to exhibitions. A third version, in landscape, known as A Ship Passing a Lock (1826) is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts. Constable”s last attempt, The Leaping Horse, was the only six-footer in the Stour series that was not sold during Constable”s lifetime.

From that moment on, he was a great promoter of the technique of dividing the brushstrokes to express the variations of light. He had a significant influence on Delacroix, Géricault and the painters of the Barbizon School, key to the future birth of impressionism.

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Last years

Constable”s joy at his own success waned after his wife began to show symptoms of tuberculosis.Her increasing illness caused Constable to house his family in Brighton from 1824 to 1828, in the hope that the sea air might restore his health.During this period, Constable divided his time between Charlotte Street in London and Brighton. This shift led Constable to move away from large-scale Stour Valley scenes in favor of coastal scenes. He continued to paint six-foot canvases, although he was initially unsure of Brighton”s suitability as a subject for painting.

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 to Francis Darby: “I would rather be a poor man than a rich man abroad.” In 1825, perhaps due in part to concerns about his wife”s ill health, the unsympathy of living in Brighton (“Piccadilly by the Seaside”) and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he fell out with Arrowsmith and lost his departure for France.

Chain Pier, Brighton was her only ambitious six-foot painting of a Brighton subject, which was exhibited in 1827. The family continued in Brighton for five years to help Mary”s health, but to no avail. After the birth of their seventh child in January 1828, they returned to Hampstead, where Mary died on November 23 at the age of 41. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding, “Every hour I feel the loss of my departed angel; God alone knows how my children will be brought up … the face of the world has been totally changed for me.”

Thereafter, she wore black and was, according to Leslie, “prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts.” She cared for her seven children alone for the rest of her life. The children were John Charles, Maria Louisa, Charles Golding, Isobel, Emma, Alfred and Lionel. Only Charles Golding Constable had offspring, a son.

Shortly before Mary died, her father had also died, leaving her £20,000. Constable speculated disastrously with the money, paying for the engraving of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication. He was hesitant and indecisive, came close to falling out with his engraver and, when the folios were published, failed to interest enough subscribers. Constable worked closely with engraver David Lucas on 40 prints of his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint. Constable said, “Lucas showed me to the public without my defects,” but the venture was not a financial success.

In this period, his art shifted from the serenity of his earlier phase to a more broken and accentuated style. The turmoil and anguish of his mind are clearly seen in his later six-foot-tall masterpieces, such as Hadleigh Castle (1829) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831), which are among his most expressive pieces.

He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52. In 1831, he began to give classes at the Royal Academy on the history of landscape that would reveal a profound knowledge of the work of his predecessors.

In 1833, he began giving public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a threefold thesis: first, landscape painting is scientific and poetic; second, imagination alone cannot produce art that compares with reality; and third, no great painter was self-taught.

He also spoke out against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere imitation.

In 1835, he delivered his last lecture to the students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and called the Academy the “cradle of British art,” was “heartily applauded.”

He died on the night of March 31, 1837, aged sixty, apparently of heart failure, and was buried with Mary in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead Church in Hampstead, London. (His sons John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family grave).

At the beginning of his career he painted portraits and some religious paintings. But from 1820 he devoted himself almost exclusively to landscapes. The subject of his paintings were his most familiar landscapes: Suffolk, Essex and Brighton. He is considered the great renovator of English landscape painting.

The vision of nature from his childhood had been engraved in his memory with such a brilliant light and with such a sharp definition that it became his main source of artistic inspiration throughout his life. His landscapes are lived landscapes and therefore we cannot say that they are neutral: this is what distinguishes him from realist painting. Constable does not seek exact realism in the representation of things, but rather the capacity of things to evoke ideas or emotions.

From 1825, a turning point in his work occurs and gradually a more somber and melancholic naturalism of longing is seen in it, where the landscapes are loaded with more feeling. The naturalism of his early years gives way to an expressionism and a greater subjectivity. This will be even more accentuated after the death of his wife, Maria, in 1828.

He was concerned with the landscape and, above all, with the environmental effects of light on nature. He chose landscapes with unstable clouds, where the appearance changes from one moment to the next. Constable stated, “The form of an object is indifferent; light, shadow and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

His technique is innovative: small stains and overlapping strokes. He applies a thick paste, sometimes with a palette knife, which distances him from the cleanliness and luminosity of other British artists of the time who were cultivators of watercolor, a technique that was more fashionable.

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The sketches

Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the “finished” painting market of clients and exhibitions, field studies were essential to his method of working. He was never content to follow a formula. “The world is wide,” he wrote, “no two days are alike, nor even two hours; nor have there ever been two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the whole world; and genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all different from each other.”

Constable painted many large-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes to test the composition. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time and continue to interest artists, scholars, and the general public. The oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example, convey a vigor and expressiveness that is lacking in Constable”s finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable”s work, the oil sketches reveal in retrospect that he was an avant-garde painter, someone who demonstrated that landscape painting could go in an entirely new direction.

Constable”s watercolors were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered one of the finest watercolors ever painted. When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable added text to the title: “The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless moor, as disconnected from the events of past ages as from the usages of the present, carries you beyond all historical records into the darkness of an entirely unknown period.”

In addition to large-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 evident even in the large-scale paintings he exhibited in London; The Chain Pier, 1827, for example, prompted one critic to write, “the atmosphere possesses a characteristic dampness, which almost conveys the desire for an umbrella.”

The sketches themselves were the first made in oil directly outdoors, with the notable exception of the oil sketches that Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes made in Rome around 1780. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used brushstrokes, often in small dabs, that sneak over lighter passages, creating an impression of bright light that envelops the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, painted around 1824 in Brighton, which captures with dark, cutting brushstrokes the immediacy of a cumulus rain at sea. Constable was also interested in painting the effects of rainbows, for example, in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows in 1831 and Cottage at East Bergholt in 1833.

To studies of the sky, he added notes, often on the back of sketches, of prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was “the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of feeling” in a landscape painting. In this habit he is known to have been influenced by meteorologist Luke Howard”s pioneering work on cloud classification; Constable”s annotations in his own copy of Thomas Forster”s Investigations into Atmospheric Phenomena show that he was aware of meteorological terminology.

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