Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Request::$request is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/request.php on line 26Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Session\DB::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/session/db.php on line 15Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$getTranslations is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__construct is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__get is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__set is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: mysqli::real_escape_string(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/db/mysqli.php on line 45Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Openbay::$logger is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/openbay.php on line 22Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/framework.php:42) in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/catalog/controller/startup/session.php on line 25Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$getLanguage is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$getLanguages is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__construct is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__get is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__set is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Automatic conversion of false to array is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/catalog/controller/startup/startup.php on line 95Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/framework.php:42) in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/catalog/controller/startup/startup.php on line 99Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Customer::$config is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/customer.php on line 14Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Customer::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/customer.php on line 15Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Customer::$request is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/customer.php on line 16Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Customer::$session is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/customer.php on line 17Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$getCurrencyByCode is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$getCurrencies is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__construct is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__get is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Proxy::$__set is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/engine/proxy.php on line 30Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/framework.php:42) in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/catalog/controller/startup/startup.php on line 157Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Currency::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/currency.php on line 7Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Currency::$language is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/currency.php on line 8Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Tax::$config is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/tax.php on line 7Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Tax::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/tax.php on line 8Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Weight::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/weight.php on line 7Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Weight::$config is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/weight.php on line 8Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Length::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/length.php on line 7Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Length::$config is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/length.php on line 8Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$config is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 7Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$customer is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 8Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$session is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 9Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$db is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 10Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$tax is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 11Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Cart\Cart::$weight is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/cart/cart.php on line 12Unknown: Creation of dynamic property Openbay::$logger is deprecated in /home3/jbenjam1/public_html/system/library/openbay.php on line 22John Constable

John Constable

Detail

John Constable (1776-1837)

John Constable, RA (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the naturalistic tradition. 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".

Constable's most famous paintings include Wivenhoe Park of 1816, 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. He became a member of the establishment after he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. His work was embraced in France, where he sold more than in his native England and inspired the Barbizon school.

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".

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. He was never satisfied 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."

Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes 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. 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."

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".

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 about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea. 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. 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. "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".

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". 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.

Menu

Category

Art styles

Manufacturers