Constable, John

Constable, John (1776-1837), English landscape painter. Constable is now one of the best-loved of all English painters, but he was slow to achieve success in his lifetime and was more appreciated in France than in his own country. His work brought a new freshness to landscape painting, based on his deep love of the countryside, and it was influential on the Impressionists.

Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, on June 11, 1776, the son of Golding Constable, a prosperous corn merchant who owned mills nearby at Dedham and Flatford, on the Essex and Suffolk banks of the River Stour. From childhood, John loved drawing but his father was reluctant to let him pursue the uncertain career of an artist and insisted he went into the family business. In 1799, however, realizing that his son’s passion for art would not abate, he gave him an allowance enabling him to study at the Royal Academy in London. He attended classes there for two or three years, but essentially he was self-taught. Like many other landscape painters of the time, he travelled to the Peak District (in 1801) and the Lake District (in 1806) to experience first-hand the grandeur of nature.

At this time, landscape painting was generally considered a less important branch of art than figure painting, and Constable occasionally painted portraits and religious works as a source of income. Landscape was his great love, however, and he concentrated on painting the places that he knew and loved, particularly the part of East Anglia in which he grew up. Then, as now, it was an area of natural beauty, with trees and meadows, and a river that served as a thoroughfare for barges drawn by horses—themes that were to be reflected in the landscapes that Constable painted throughout his life. To this period belong his first major landscapes: Dedham Vale: Morning (1811, Elton Hall, Huntingdonshire); Boatbuilding near Flatford Mill (1814-1815, Victoria and Albert Museum, London); The Stour Valley and Dedham Village (1815, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and Flatford Mill on the River Stour (1817, Tate Gallery, London).

Constable usually spent the summer and early autumn in East Anglia, making oil sketches and drawings in the open air, and the rest of the year in London, developing his sketches into finished paintings. In his paintings he attempted to keep the freshness of his feelings in front of nature, to convey a sense of “light, dews, breezes, bloom” (as he wrote in a letter to his friend and biographer C. R. Leslie). To do this, he used much bolder, rougher brushwork than was customary, and to many of his contemporaries, who were used to a smooth, painstaking, glossy paint surface, his work looked crude and unfinished.

Constable first had a painting shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1802, and he exhibited there every year (except 1804) up until 1836. However, he made slow progress in professional acceptance. It was not until 1819 that he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and not until 1829, when he was past 50, that he became a full Academician.

In 1816 Constable’s father died, leaving him financially secure. This enabled him at last to marry his long-standing fiancée Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the rector of East Bergholt. They had become engaged in 1809 against the wishes of her family, who thought, with some reason, that Constable could not afford to support her. Their marriage was a very happy one, but sadly short-lived; Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828, aged 40, leaving Constable with seven young children, on whom he doted.

In 1819 the family had moved to Hampstead, at this time still a village on the northern outskirts of London, and this was Constable’s home for the rest of his life (his house can still be seen there). A major reason for moving out of central London was that he hoped that the cleaner air would be better for Maria’s health. He came to love Hampstead Heath, which features in many of his paintings, as do scenes of Brighton, which he also periodically visited with Maria. Another favourite subject for his paintings was Salisbury Cathedral (one of his best friends, the Reverend John Fisher, was nephew of the Bishop of Salisbury).

By this time Constable was producing what are now his most admired works and, exhibiting them at the Royal Academy, was at last gaining critical recognition. Of these, the six most famous landscapes are The White Horse (1819, Frick Collection, New York), Stratford Mill (1820, Yale Center for British Art), The Haywain (1821, National Gallery, London), View on the Stour near Dedham (1822, Huntington Library, San Marino), The Lock (1824, private collection), and The Leaping Horse (1825, Royal Academy of Arts, London). All, with the exception of The Haywain, are river scenes, and all show the artist’s intimate knowledge of that part of the English countryside, and its atmosphere, that he loved. Abandoning the finer, more traditionally accurate brushwork of his earlier work, Constable used patches of pure colour to render the effect of light on water, trees, and pastureland, and the atmosphere of cloud and sky.

In 1824 The Haywain was shown at the Paris Salon (the French equivalent of the Royal Academy exhibition) along with another of Constable’s paintings. It was awarded a gold medal, and the freshness of observation in Constable’s work caused great excitement among French artists and critics; one visitor to the Salon was overheard remarking in astonishment: “Look at these English pictures—the very dew is on the ground.” However, Constable never visited France himself; indeed, he never left England.

In his final years, with the status that came with his full membership of the Royal Academy, Constable took to lecturing on landscape painting, hoping to raise its status. He also supervised engravings of his work, which appeared under the title English Landscape Scenery in 1829. By the time of his death, however, his reputation was still fairly modest. He died suddenly at his home in Hampstead on March 31, 1837, aged 60, and was buried in the parish churchyard next to his wife. In 1843 his friend and fellow painter Charles Robert Leslie published his Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, and this affectionate book, one of the classics of artistic biography, did much to secure Constable’s posthumous fame.

The paintings in Constable’s possession at his death passed to his daughter Isabel, who in 1888 presented them to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which consequently has the finest collection of his work.