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    Constable
    Constable
    Constable
    Ebook105 pages34 minutes

    Constable

    By Victoria Charles

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    About this ebook

    John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable was the first landscape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting; an idea which contains in essence the destinies of modern landscape, and perhaps of most modern painting. It is this momentary impression of all things which will be the soul of the future work. Working at leisure upon the large canvas, an artist’s aim is to enrich and complete the sketch while retaining its pristine freshness. These are the two processes to which Constable devoted himself, while discovering the exuberant abundance of life in the simplest of country places. He had the palette of a creative colourist and a technique of vivid hatchings heralding that of the French impressionists. He audaciously and frankly introduced green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow, or more often brown spectacles. Of the great landscape painters who occupied so important a place in nineteenth-century art, Corot was probably the only one to escape the influence of Constable. All the others are more or less direct descendants of the master of East Bergholt.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateDec 22, 2011
    ISBN9781781606070
    Constable

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      Book preview

      Constable - Victoria Charles

      Author: Victoria Charles

      © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

      © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

      ISBN 978-1-78160-607-0

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

      Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

      Victoria Charles

      John

      Constable

      Table of content

      1. Daniel Maclise, Constable painting, c.1831

      2. Riverside; ship against the sunset, c. 1800

      3. Incised Outline of a Windmill, fragment of the windmill on East Bergholt Heath, 1792

      BIOGRAPHY

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      1. Daniel Maclise, Constable painting, c.1831.

      Pencil sketch, 15 x 11.5 cm,

      National Portrait Gallery, London.

      John Constable is arguably the best-loved English artist. His fame and popularity are rivalled only by those of his great contemporary, J. M. W. Turner. But like Turner, his reputation rests on a handful of very well-known paintings, normally Suffolk scenes such as Flatford Mill (p. 35) or the Hay-Wain (p. 48). The latter in particular is so famous that it sometimes overshadows the rest of his work, whereas we know from Constable’s writings that he set greater store by his Stratford Mill, and once declared that it was Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows (p. 71) rather than the Hay-Wain which best embodied ‘the full compass’ of his art. For all its fame, even the Hay-Wain itself is misunderstood. It is so familiar that it is hard for a modern spectator to grasp the enormous impact it had upon some of the greatest French painters of the day. In order fully to appreciate Constable’s achievement, one must first attempt to clear away some of the many misconceptions surrounding his work.

      He was, for example, a more versatile artist than most of his modern admirers realise. It is true that he was deeply and sentimentally attached to the scenery of Suffolk, and unlike many of his colleagues he did not normally tour in search of material; but his friendships and family life forced him to travel, and so there is diversity in his subject matter, embracing the Lake District, Hampstead, Kent, Dorset, Sussex and Salisbury. Many of the magisterial productions of his last years, including Hadleigh Castle and The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (p. 74) are a far cry from the Suffolk scenes, whilst his accomplishments within the difficult and competitive genre of marine painting have been consistently undervalued.

      A persistent error surrounding Constable’s work is that it is somehow ‘artless’ and untouched by theory – that he simply ‘painted what he saw’ in response to the beauty of the English countryside. On the contrary, he was a sophisticated, reflective artist whose naturalism was hard-won, based on an incessant study of nature, the Old Masters and wide reading. Far from

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