CONSTABLE, JOHN

CONSTABLE, JOHN (1776–1837), English painter.

Along with J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), the most celebrated landscape painter of his day, John Constable came of age at the turn of the eighteenth century, when William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) were launching a revolution in poetry that came to be known as English Romanticism. Just as Wordsworth proclaimed—in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800)—that poetry should speak "the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" and celebrate man's emotional bond to nature in "humble and rustic life," Constable affirmed the value of a "natural painture"—a natural style in painting—and dedicated himself to achieving "a pure and unaffected manner" of painting rural scenes. Like Wordsworth, he represented rustic life as an alternative to urban life when the Industrial Revolution was drawing thousands into English cities. Unlike Turner, who painted railway trains and coal furnaces as well nature in all its glory, Constable strove to capture the simplicity of rural life and labor just as industrial displacement was radically transforming both.

Constable achieved his distinctive style much more slowly than Turner did, and not till the age of fifty-two did he gain full membership in the Royal Academy, the professional association of British artists. His long quest for recognition was partly impeded by his subject matter. Born and raised in the village of East Bergholt, Suffolk, in the valley of the River Stour, where his father owned several water mills and considerable property, Constable grew so attached to the scenery of his birthplace that it came to dominate his canvases. "I should paint my own places best," he wrote. "Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my 'careless boyhood' to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (& I am gratefull)" (Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 78). Though rural scenery now holds a distinguished place in the history of British art, it had to fight for that place. In 1799, when Constable began studying at the academy, landscape painting was still considered inferior to "history painting"—the representation of Biblical and historical events. But landscape had long since begun to rival and challenge history. Activated and authorized by what had already become a tradition of landscape painting, Constable's work reflects both nature and artistic nurture. Beginning with Dedham Vale (1802), his paintings spring not only from his scrutiny of trees, clouds, and streams but also from his study of landscape in the works of Claude Lorrain and Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), of seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael, and of English painters such as Thomas Gainsborough, who likewise depicted the scenery of his native Suffolk.

Constable seldom painted portraits and scarcely presents a face in any of his paintings, but human beings play distinctive roles in them, for his landscapes typically represent men and women at work. In The Hay Wain (1821), probably his best-known painting, two men drive a hay wagon across the River Stour toward a distant field where several others—mere spots of white—are gathering hay. In The Lock (1824), Constable depicts a brawny-armed, red-vested workman straining to open the shutter of a lock gate so as to release the water in a basin where a barge is waiting to make its way down the river to the sea. Because the viewpoint is low and the lock operator occupies the midpoint of the painting, he becomes—in every sense—its central figure.

Besides challenging the supremacy of history painting by making a place for rural scenery and for nameless figures in his art, Constable also rejected the notion that landscape paintings should look burnished, should always wear the golden brown hue of an old fiddle. He displeased some connoisseurs because they thought he used too much green, and when he strove to catch the sparkling iridescence of nature by means of white highlights, they thought his work "unfinished." But Constable gradually taught his public how to see. In the spring of 1824, when The Lock made a decided hit at the Royal Academy exhibition, he triumphantly declared: "My picture is liked at the Academy. Indeed it forms a decided feature and its light cannot be put out because it is the light of nature…. My execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones—perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness is [sic]too much, but these things are the essence of landscape" (Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 157). Later in the same year, The Hay Wain and View on the Stour near Dedham (1822) won a gold medal in Paris at the Salon, the official exhibition held each year by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The winning pictures, which to one observer made the ground look "covered with dew," powerfully influenced the great French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Though Constable left no English successors, he may—through Delacroix—have led the way to impressionism.

See alsoImpressionism; Romanticism; Turner, J. M. W.

bibliography

Primary Sources

John Constable's Correspondence, edited by R. S. Beckett. 6 vols. London, 1962–1966.

Leslie, Charles Robert, ed. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable. Rev. ed., edited by Jonathan Mayne. London, 1951.

Secondary Sources

Reynolds, Graham. The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1984.

Rosenthal, Michael. Constable: The Painter and His Landscape. New Haven, Conn., 1983.

James A. W. Heffernan

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. □

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 concentrated on studying nature and rarely painted outside the genre of landscape: ‘my art is to be found under every hedge.’ Initially, he worked in the manner of Gainsborough, but slowly developed his own style of conveying nature and humble subjects so as to appear spontaneous and without what he called ‘fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee’. This gained him little recognition at home but a growing reputation in France where his Haywain (1821) influenced the modern school of landscape painters. In 1819 he became ARA, but a further ten years elapsed before he was elected a full academician. Today he is recognized with Turner as the major English landscape painter of the 19th cent.

June Cochrane

Constable, John (1776–1837) English painter, a leading western landscapist. He attended the Royal Academy (1795–1802) and studied the paintings of Claude Lorrain. He considered every effect of clouds and light on water, often using broken colour and a thick impasto texture. His first success came when The Haywain (1821) and View on the Stour (1817) were shown at the 1824 Paris Salon, although recognition in England only came after his death. He had a great impact on French romantic artists, notably Delacroix.

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