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(b East Bergholt, Suffolk, 11 June 1776; d Hampstead, 31 March 1837). English painter and draughtsman. His range and aspirations were less extensive than those of his contemporary J. M. W. Turner, but these two artists have traditionally been linked as the giants of early 19th-century British landscape painting and isolated from the many other artists practising landscape at a time when it was unprecedentedly popular. Constable has often been defined as the great 'naturalist' and deliberately presented himself thus in his correspondence, although his stylistic variety indicates an instability in his perception of what constituted 'nature'. He has also been characterized as having painted only the places he knew intimately, which other artists tended to pass by. While the exclusivity of Constable's approach is indisputable, his concern with local scenery was not unique, being shared by the contemporary Norwich artists. By beginning to sketch in oil from nature seriously in 1808, he also conformed with the practice of artists such as Thomas Christopher Hofland (1777-1843), William Alfred Delamotte, Turner and, particularly, the pupils of John Linnell. Turner shared his commitment to establishing landscape as the equal of history painting, despite widespread disbelief in this notion. Nevertheless, although Constable was less singular than he might have liked people to believe, his single-mindedness in portraying so limited a range of sites was unique, and the brilliance of his oil sketching unprecedented, while none of his contemporaries was producing pictures resembling The Haywain (1821; London, N.G.) or the Leaping Horse (1825; London, RA). This very singularity was characteristic of British artists at a time when members of most occupations were stressing their individuality in the context of a rapidly developing capitalist economy.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
| Biography: John Constable |
John Constable (1776-1837), one of the greatest English landscape painters, represented the naturalistic aspect of romanticism. His calm, deeply poetic response to nature approximated in painting the insights of William Wordsworth in poetry.
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, on June 11, 1776, the son of a well-to-do mill owner. The lush, well-watered Suffolk landscape with its rolling clouds and generally flat, but in parts undulating, terrain made a deep impression on his imagination, and no painter has referred more frequently to the scenes of his childhood as a recurrent source of inspiration. "Those scenes," he later wrote to a friend, "made me a painter," and again, "The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things."
Constable was encouraged first by a local amateur and later by his friend Sir George Beaumont, the painter and collector, who advised him to study the watercolors of Thomas Girtin. Constable said that a painting by Claude Lorrain that he saw at this time marked an important epoch in his life. Beaumont's collection later included the Château de Steen by Peter Paul Rubens, which Constable stable studied closely.
On a visit to London in 1796 Constable met the engraver and antiquary J. T. Smith, under whose influence he made sketches of picturesque cottages. In 1799 Constable became a student at the Royal Academy, where he worked diligently at anatomy under a system of instruction concentrating on the human figure as the basis of history painting.
Nature Paintings
In 1802 Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time, declaring his intention to become a "natural painter." The following year he sailed from London to Deal, making drawings of ships in the tradition of the English Thames Estuary school. "I saw," Constable wrote to a friend, "all sorts of weather," and what he described as "the natural history of the skies" became a lifelong object of research, culminating in a series of cloud sketches inspired by the cloud classifications of the meteorologist Luke Howard, who published The Climate of London in 1818-1820.
In 1806 Constable spent 2 months touring the Lake District, and the following year he exhibited three paintings from the trip at the Royal Academy. After this, however, he broke with the tradition of picturesque travel, preferring to paint the scenes he knew and loved best, notably his native Suffolk; Salisbury, where he stayed with his friend Bishop Fisher and his family; Hampstead Heath; and the Thames Estuary.
A happy marriage to Maria Bicknell, with whom Constable fell in love in 1809, was delayed until 1816 by the opposition of her maternal grandfather, the wealthy rector of East Bergholt. From these 7 years of uncertainty date those attacks of nervous depression which were occasionally to cloud a life of otherwise singular felicity.
In 1824 three of Constable's oil paintings, including The Hay Wain, were exhibited at the Paris Salon, where they were acclaimed by Eugène Delacroix and other painters and won a gold medal. The question of their influence on French contemporaries and ultimately on impressionism has been widely discussed. All that can safely be said is that his break with academic convention made a profound impact and was invoked as a sanction by Delacroix not for imitating the English painter but for greater boldness in his own work.
Constable's wife, with whom he had seven children, died in 1828, shortly after he inherited a fortune from her father. Constable had been elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1819, and 10 years later he became a full member. He died on March 31, 1837, working on the day before his death on Arundel Mill and Castle.
Original Contribution
Constable's finished landscapes were always greatly admired. He was revolutionary in painting large canvases consistently as sketches, and he later allowed himself considerable painterly freedom in finished pictures, like the magnificent Hadleigh Castle, subtitled Mouth of the Thames, Morning after a Stormy Night. Today it is his large sketchlike paintings that are most sought after, particularly those celebrating the themes that had haunted him from childhood: the mill, the lock, and water reflecting sunlight and clouds.
Constable's original contribution was to combine a scientific approach to nature with a romantic intensity of feeling. "Painting," he wrote, "is a science, and should be considered as an enquiry into the laws of nature." But he described his cloud studies as organs of his sentiment, and in a much-quoted passage declared, "painting is with me but another word for feeling."
Further Reading
The best source for information on Constable is still his own writings. The Letters of John Constable, R. A., to C. R. Leslie, R. A., 1826-1837, edited by Peter Leslie (1931), contains both the letters, rich in observations on nature and art and illustrating Constable's genius for friendship, and the notes for Constable's critical lectures on the history of landscape painting delivered to the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1836. Also extremely useful are R. B. Beckett, John Constable and the Fishers: The Record of a Friendship (1952), and a six-volume edition of Constable's Correspondence, edited by R. B. Beckett (1962-1968). Besides C. R. Leslie's classic, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R. A., Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1943; new ed. 1951), there is a scholarly literature of distinction on Constable. Preeminent is Graham Reynolds, Constable: The Natural Painter (1965). Sydney J. Key, John Constable: His Life and Work (1948), is a sound account. One of the best sources of illustrations, reproducing 597 works, is the Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of the Constable Collection, written by Graham Reynolds (1960). A masterly specialized study, establishing Constable's relation to both poets and painters, is Kurt Badt, John Constable's Clouds (trans. 1950).
Additional Sources
Constable, Freda, John Constable: a biography, 1776-1837, Lavenham: Dalton, 1975.
| British History: John Constable |
Constable, John (1776-1837). Landscape painter, born at East Bergholt (Suffolk), the son of a miller. At first intended for the church, then to follow his father, eventually Constable was allowed to go to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools. Encouraged by Benjamin West, Constable rarely painted outside the genre of landscape: ‘my art is to be found under every hedge.’ In 1819 he became ARA, but a further ten years elapsed before he was elected a full academician.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: John Constable |
Bibliography
See catalog of the latter collection by G. Reynolds (1960); C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (enl. ed. 1937); collections of his letters by P. Holmes (1931) and R. B. Beckett (1962); biography by B. Taylor (1973); studies by C. Peacock (rev. ed. 1972) and R. Gadney (1976).
| Fine Arts Dictionary: Constable, John |
An English landscape painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, known for his pastoral scenes.
| Wikipedia: 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".[2]
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.
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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 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. 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."[3] 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:
| “ | 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.[4] | ” |
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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] | ” |
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."[8]
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.[9]
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".[10] 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.[11]
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."[12]
In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"[13]), 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".[14]
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.[15]
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".[16] 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".[17]
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."[18]
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.[18] 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."[19]
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".[2]
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.[13] 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.[20] 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.[21] "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".[22]
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".[23] 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.
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 courses.
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