Step 3: Punctuation and Logic

Exercise 1:

John constable

(1776-1837)

John Constable is one of the few English painters to have been among the really great artists of the world. Most English artists followed the styles of the artists of mainland Europe, but Constable started a style of painting outdoor scenes that made European artists completely change their ideas about landscape painting. Previously they had liked to paint calm, park-like scenes in quiet colors that were not at all like the real countryside, but Constable painted nature as it really is. The trees in his pictures are real trees, not the sort that might decorate a theater curtain; he really looked at skies when he painted them and no one has ever shown them better in all their moods. For his subjects he took the simple fields, trees, and waters of the English scene, and figures were farm laborers and other country people.

Constable was born at East Bergholt in the county of Suffolk where his father owned water-mills and windmills. When he was 17 he was set to work in the mills, but he loved painting even while he was a boy and used to study it in his spare time with an older friend John Dunthorne who was the local plumber and glazier.

In 1795, Constable was allowed to go to London to study painting, and four years later he became a student at the Royal Acad­emy Schools and made painting his pro-it Victoria and Albert Museum, London Constable's painting Boat Building Near Flatford Mill, 1815, was unusual in being painted wholly outdoors. For a long time he learned by imitating famous painters and it was not until he was over 30 that he began to show his genius in painting the landscapes of the English countryside that have since made his name so famous.

When he was 43 he was elected an associ­ate of the Royal Academy and ten years later became a full member. In 1824 a Frenchman who had bought three of his pictures sent them to the Paris Salon, an important exhi­bition of pictures held each year. There they caused a sensation and for one of his paint­ings, The Hay Wain, Constable won a gold medal. Delacroix, the French painter, referred to him as "one of the glories of England". French painters and critics still admire and honor Constable, and they think that his work had a great influence on land­scape painting in France.

Constable married Maria Bicknell in 1816. The portrait he painted other in 1816 can be seen in the Tate Gallery, London. They had seven children. The family lived mostly in London, and Constable was often very worried about money until he was left a sum of money by his father-in-law in 1828. In the same year, however, his wife died, and he never recovered from his grief.

His best-known paintings include The Hay Wain and The Cornfield, which are in the National Gallery, London. Dedham Vale is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, also in London, which has a fine collection of his paintings and sketches. Hadleigh Castle, painted in 1829, is in the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.