Text e. John Constable

In the art of John Constable (1776-1837) the tendency to concentrate on the much-loved local scene and the process by which English painters had assimilated the lessons of Dutch landscape reached their marvelous peak. Constable seems one who was born to extend the realm of landscape painting and in him the regional sense was accompanied by gifts so great and feelings so sensitive that he contributed something of immense originality and import to the art of the world. A likeness to Crome appears in his attachment to his native Suffolk and 'all that lies on the banks of the Stour', though a comparison between the two reveals a great difference of both mind and intention. Crome was not an innovator; he was content with tradition in painting as he found it. Constable's response to nature was a more conscious appreciation of its moods which in itself made for technical departure. It was not only 'the sound of water escaping from mill-dams … willows, old rotten planks ...', of the waterways that gave him pleasure as memories of boyhood but the movement of nature, the sweep of cloud shadows, the transient gleams of light, 'Light-dews-breezes-bloom-and-freshness; not one of which has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world,' said Constable himself.

To perfect them something more was needed than could be represented by Crome's precept to 'keep the masses large and in good and beautiful lines'; a mode of painting that caught and held the temperament of the scene, as none had done before. To achieve this aim it was essential to discard the conventions of which landscape had acquired a large store: the celebrated 'brown tree', for instance, which Sir George Beaumont considered a sine qua non; to have always in mind the natural truth which, however, Constable never deemed alien from poetry.

To a point, in self-education, he followed an established road, though his development was slow and much hampered by family objections to painting as a career. He studied the Dutch painters and Rembrandt's Mill always appealed to this other miller's son as an 'epoch in itself. Ruisdael was a particular delight and in describing a Ruisdael as 'true, clean and fresh and as brisk as champagne; a shower has not long passed' Constable finds the suggestion of his own art. He studied Wilson and Gainsborough, perceiving in them the revival of landscape from a 'degraded and fallen state'. He seems to have been mainly influenced by Gainsborough in his early work until he saw a number of drawings by Girtin in Sir George Beaumont's Collection which suggested a new freedom and breadth of approach – a signal instance of the influence of the watercolor school on the course of oil painting – observable in the sketches made in the Lake District in 1806. It seems as if the gathered force of thought, study, and observation burst splendidly forth when Constable was about thirty-five. A brilliant example of the early 'sketch' is the Malvern Hall, Worcestershire (1809?). The first of the large paintings sent to the Academy was the Flatford Mill of 1817. It was in 1821 that he painted the Hay Wain (originally called Landscape, Noon) which when exhibited at the Salon of 1824 had so profound an effect on Delacroix as to induce him to add new touches to his Massacres of Scio.

Constable did not confine himself to the part of the Stour valley which is now known as 'the Constable country', though he is essentially a painter of southern England. Hampstead, the coast at Weymouth and Brighton, Salisbury where he stayed with his friend, Archdeacon Fisher, all provided him with subjects, and in each region he brings into play a unique capacity for rendering the freshness of atmosphere and the incidence of light. An analysis of his work shows three main forms. First there are the small oil 'sketches', paintings swiftly made in the open air direct from nature. Using panels prepared with a reddish ground he was able to accentuate the vividness of green and blue laid over it while allowing the ground to play a unifying part and suggest, where it is left in view, translucence of shadow. There are, secondly, those large preparatory paintings for some finished work in which his method is nearest to that of Impressionism, broken touches of colour used with an incomparable verve animating the canvas with sparkling movement. The finished picture sometimes established a certain compromise between this vitality and the more static and traditional qualities of finish. The difference can be seen for instance in a comparison of the Hay Wain and the free study for it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former sacrifices something of life, though it is full of beautiful detail on which Constable lavished all his affection for the typical East Anglian ingredients.

There comes, however, a stage when he is able to retain all the spontaneity of the sketch with a massive completeness as in The Leaping Horse and the Hadleigh Castle of 1829. Constable was essentially an oil painter, deeply engaged with the life inherent in the paint substance. His watercolors, though sometimes as impressive as the Stonehenge and Old Sarum in the Victoria and Albert Museum, were never conceived as complete works in themselves but as notes of an oil painter. He used oil paint with a decision and a singular effect of truth which sometimes recalls Manet as much as anyone – for instance in that small masterpiece the Brighton Beach with Colliers of 1824. The same almost uncanny identification of paint and natural effect is to be seen in the sketch of Willy Lott's House near Flatford Mill in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where his intimate development can be so well studied. In some later works there is a dramatic vehemence which might almost be termed Post-Impressionist, though the studious mood in which he made a minute study of an elm tree or a careful map of cloud forms shows the intensity of his nature worship.

It is one of the ironies of English painting or a symptom of its ungregarious individualism that so great an artist left little impression on his own country and that the creative prospect he opened should be left to be explored by Corot and others in France.