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John Constable (11 June, 1776 – 31 March, 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home — now known as "Constable Country" — which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling". His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of
1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and
valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did
not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England. John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was mentally handicapped and so John was expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham.
Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his
younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills. In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips
in the surrounding Suffolk countryside that 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." He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex,
he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who
advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's
business rather than take up art professionally. In
1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue art, and Golding
even granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools
as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections
as well as studying and copying Old Masters. Among works that
particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci 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. In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College, a move which Benjamin West (then
master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that
year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled
out his determination to become a professional landscape painter: His
early style has many of the 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, notably of Claude Lorrain. Constable's
usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an
age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.
He did, however, make occasional trips further afield. For example, in
1803 he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman ship Coutts as it visited south-east coastal ports, and in 1806 he undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District. But
he told his friend and biographer Charles Leslie that the solitude of
the mountains oppressed his spirits; Leslie went on to write: In
order to make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found
dull work — though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted
occasional religious pictures, but according to John Walker,
"Constable's incapacity as a religious painter cannot be overstated." Constable
adopted a routine of spending the winter in London and painting at East
Bergholt in the summer. And in 1811 he first visited John Fisher and
his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding
landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings. From
1809 onwards, his childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell developed
into a deep, mutual love. But their engagement in 1816 was opposed by
Maria's grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who considered the Constables his social inferiors and threatened Maria with disinheritance. Maria's
father, Charles Bicknell, a solicitor, was reluctant to see Maria throw
away this inheritance, and Maria herself pointed out that a penniless
marriage would detract from any chances John had of making a career in
painting. Golding
and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of
supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure; but
they died in quick succession, and Constable inherited a fifth share in
the family business. John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating) was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast, where the sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated
Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious
brushwork. At the same time, a greater emotional range began to
register 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. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy that year, and in 1821 he showed The Hay Wain (a view from Flatford Mill) at the Academy's exhibition. Théodore Géricault saw it on a visit to London and was soon praising Constable in Paris, where a dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought four paintings, including The Hay Wain, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, winning a gold medal. Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal: "What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to every tone". Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 Massacre de Scio after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good. In
his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England,
but in France he sold more than twenty 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 [in England] than a rich man abroad." In
1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the
uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarrelled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet. After the birth of her seventh child in January 1828, Maria fell ill and died of tuberculosis that
November at the age of forty-one. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote
to his brother Golding, "hourly do I feel the loss of my departed
Angel — God only knows how my children will be brought up… the face of the
World is totally changed to me". Thereafter,
he always dressed in black and was, according to Leslie, "a prey to
melancholy and anxious thoughts". He cared for his seven children alone
for the rest of his life. Shortly
before her death, Maria's father had died, leaving her £20,000.
Constable speculated disastrously with this money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of
some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication. He was
hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when
the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers.
Constable collaborated closely with the talented mezzotinter David
Lucas on some 40 prints after 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 faults", but the
venture was not a financial success. He was elected to the Royal Academy in
February 1829, at the age of 52, and in 1831 was appointed Visitor at
the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the
students. He
also began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape
painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series
of such lectures at the Royal Institution,
Constable proposed a threefold 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. He also later spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation". In
1835, 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 "cheered most heartily". He died on the night of the 31st March, apparently from indigestion, and was buried with Maria in the graveyard of St John-at-Hampstead, Hampstead. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family tomb.) 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,
and he never satisfied himself 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. Possibly more than
any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in
retrospect to have been an avant garde painter, one who demonstrated
that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction. 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. When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge,
standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with
the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries
you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally
unknown period." 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 Chain Pier, 1827,
for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a
characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an
umbrella". 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 in around 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, and in Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833. 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. In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; Constable's annotations of his own copy of Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology. "I
have done a good deal of skying", Constable wrote to Fisher on 23
October 1821; "I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that
most arduous one among the rest". 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 not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century. |