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