   #copyright

John Constable

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   A self portrait by John Constable
   A self portrait by John Constable

   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 43. He sold more paintings in France than
   in his native England.

Biography

Early career

   John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour
   in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann Constable. His father was a wealthy corn
   merchant, owner of Flatford Mill and, later, Dedham Mill. 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. He worked at 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.
   Constable's Dedham Vale of 1802
   Constable's Dedham Vale of 1802

   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:

     For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and
     seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to
     represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set
     out, but have rather 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 bravura, an attempt to do something
     beyond the truth.

   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, though he did 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:

     His nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with
     scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human
     associations. He required villages, churches, farmhouses and
     cottages.

   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.

Marriage and maturity

   Maria Bicknell, painted by Constable in 1816
   Maria Bicknell, painted by Constable in 1816

   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.
   Constable's Weymouth Bay
   Constable's Weymouth Bay

   John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 was followed by 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.
   Constable's The Hay Wain of 1821
   Constable's The Hay Wain of 1821

   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.

   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 RA, in which he
   praised Raphael and called the R.A. the "cradle of British art", was
   "cheered most heartily".He died on the night of the 31st March,
   apparently from indigestion.

Art

   Constable's The Cornfield of 1826
   Constable's The Cornfield of 1826

   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 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".
   Constable's Seascape Study with Rain Cloud c.1824
   Constable's Seascape Study with Rain Cloud c.1824

   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.

   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.

Paintings

   Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable, ca. 1825. As a gesture of
   appreciation for the Bishop of Salisbury, who commissioned this
   painting, Constable included the Bishop and his wife in the canvas.
   Their figures can be seen at the bottom left of the painting, behind
   the fence and under the shade of the trees.
   Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable, ca. 1825. As a gesture of
   appreciation for the Bishop of Salisbury, who commissioned this
   painting, Constable included the Bishop and his wife in the canvas.
   Their figures can be seen at the bottom left of the painting, behind
   the fence and under the shade of the trees.
     * Dedham Vale, 1802.
     * The Hay Wain, 1821.
     * Salisbury Cathedral, 1825.
     * The Cornfield, 1826.
     * Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1829.
     * Brighton Beach with Colliers, 1824.
     * Boat-building near Flatford Mill, 1815.
     * Study of Cirrus Clouds, c. 1822.

Constable locations

   Bridge Cottage, is a National Trust property, open to the public.
   Nearby Flatford Mill and Willie Lott's cottage (the house visible in
   The Hay Wain) are used by the Field Studies Council for art courses.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constable"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
