John Constable

JOHN CONSTABLE East Bergholt, Suffolk 1776 – 1837 London Constable, with Turner, is the most important British landscape painter of the nineteenth century, revered for his ‘naturalism’ while Turner’s landscapes suggest grandeur and generalisation. Unlike Turner, Constable did not roam far abroad on picturesque tours, instead creating his art from familiar, much-loved scenery. John Constable, the son of a prosperous miller, was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk in 1776. In 1799 he attended the Royal Academy Schools and had informal tuition from the landscape artist Joseph Farington, as well as copying Old Masters. Constable returned to Bergholt and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802, surviving on family money and a modest portrait practice. In 1806 he toured the Lake District, making watercolours of the ‘sublime’ scenery. ‘Truth to nature’ was Constable’s credo; from 1808 he made oil sketches from nature as well as pencil drawings of parts of his compositions. These were then used as aide-memoires for an exhibition piece painted in the studio, such as Flatford lock and mill (RA 1812), a view of his father’s mill. In 1811 Constable visited Salisbury at the Bishop’s invitation and formed a lifelong friendship with the Bishop’s nephew the Rev. John Fisher. He returned to Salisbury throughout his life, painting some of his finest, most moving pictures of the Cathedral in sunshine, showers and overarched by a rainbow. Like the productive fields of the Stour valley where he grew up, the Cathedral represented for the deeply conservative Constable the core values of England which must be preserved in a changing, often threatening world. In 1809 Constable had fallen in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the Rector of East Bergholt, but they were not able to marry until 1816, because her family (quite correctly) doubted Constable’s ability to support a wife. That year Constable moved permanently to London and began to produce more ambitious paintings such as Whitehall Stairs, June 18th 1817 (the opening of Waterloo Bridge) (1817; exhibited 1832; Tate Gallery, London) and the ‘six-footer’ Stour view The white horse (Frick Collection, New York) which was shown to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1819. That same year Constable became an Associate of the Royal Academy. Seeking fresh air for his consumptive wife, he rented a house at Hampstead and from circa 1820-22 produced a series of brilliant oil studies of skies, noting times of day and weather conditions. From 1824 family holidays in Brighton inspired oils and watercolours of panoramic coast scenes full of light and air. In 1824 Constable sold The haywain (RA 1821; National Gallery, London) to the Parisian dealer John Arrowsmith. The painting won a gold medal in the Paris Salon and Constable’s naturalistic approach to landscape and free, expressive brushwork was highly influential on French painters such as Delacroix and Huet. In 1828 Maria Constable died; the following year her devastated husband was elected RA and remarked bitterly that there was now no beloved wife to make the honour sweet. Constable’s bleakness is reflected in stormy, expressionistic paintings like Hadleigh castle, 1828-9 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut), where the ruin symbolises himself. In 1830 Constable supervised John Lucas’s mezzotints after his paintings, English landscape. Constable increasingly saw landscape in terms of chiaroscuro – composition unified by light and shade – and was less interested in individual elements, symbolism, or ‘historical motifs’ in his painting. Like Turner, though with a totally different approach, he believed passionately in the importance of landscape painting within the heirarchy of artistic genres. Landscape painting was not inferior, but was a paramount expression of a nation’s genius. Constable was an excellent, dedicated teacher at the Royal Academy Schools and lectured on the history of landscape painting. A touchy, affectionate and utterly sincere man, he died in London on 31st March 1837. The work of John Constable is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Tate Gallery, London; the National Gallery, Washington DC and the Louvre, Paris.