|
 John
Constable looked closely at the properties of shifting
light and the movements of clouds, creating paeans to
actual places and times of day. Like his contemporary,
Joseph Mallard William Turner, Constable was a product
of his times, but Constable's work more anticipated
the concerns of the
Impressionists.
In 1799, when Turner was already a member of the
Royal Academy, Constable entered its school as a
student. Unlike Turner, Constable painted landscape
with an eye to verisimilitude. His more prosaic views
of nature, following the traditions of such Dutch
masters as Ruisdale and Cyp, were unfashionable.
Constable was thirty-nine before he sold a picture,
and in his fifties before he was invited to join the
Royal Academy.
Constable's career was spent creating poetic
expressions of his native Stour Valley. During the
summers he would work in the village of East Bergholt,
where he was born. This region of Suffolk and the
Stour Valley came to be known as Constable country.
There he made sketches, both painted and drawn. These
"notes" would become the basis for the large and
ambitious canvases that he would prepare in London for
the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Constable's sketches of skies and sites such as
Dedham Lock and Mill are regarded today as
important works that capture the spirit and feeling of
the countryside, possible to attain only when the
artist is working directly from nature.
One of the earliest Western European artists to
study changing light and
atmospheric conditions so closely, Constable kept notes and diaries
recording weather conditions and times of day. In working out-of-doors,
Constable was anticipating the direction that the Impressionists would
later take with such conviction. But for him, producing large canvases
outside was impractical: his "six-footers", designed to catch the
attention of Royal Academy visitors, were painted in his studio, as was
common practice until the Impressionists decided to do more than sketch
outside.
 Constable,
who made nature his subject, was dedicated to
understanding and developing new ways to describe its
mutability. The sky especially engrossed him. "The sky
is the source of light in nature and governs
everything", he remarked, and his obsession yielded
the largest body of sky and cloud studies produced in
Western art. He also experimented with different
techniques, such as stippling the canvas with white
flecks to capture the effect of wet leaves and dew, or
incorporating dots of red that would make the green of
the vegetation stand out and register more
prominently. These attempts, like his outdoor studies,
were an important inspiration to the later
Impressionists.
The death of his beloved wife, Mary, in 1828
affected Constable profoundly. His work became darker
and more brooding, infused directly or indirectly with
a sense of mourning. Though he was interested in the
real appearance of things, he was not a dispassionate
observer. His subjects had, as they did for all
Romantic artists, strong personal meanings and ties;
his attachment to nature was emotional as well as
intellectual. An acquaintance of Wordsworth, Constable
shared his belief in the beautiful, evocative aspects
of nature and in the value of the humble. He also felt
a strong affinity for poetry, occasionally exhibiting
his works with lines of noted poems.
Although recognition for his work came slowly in
England, Constable gained renown more rapidly in
France. His Hay Wain was seen by Géricault in
London at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1821.
Géricault was so impressed with the work that, at his
behest, it was bought by a French dealer and exhibited
in the Paris Salon of 1824, where it won a gold medal.
French artists such as Géricault and
Delacroix admired Constable's freedom of brushwork
and the freshness of his subject matter. He was a
fundamental inspiration to the French Romantics and
also to the French painters of landscape.
Excerpts from C.R. Lewis' Memoirs of the Life
of John Constable
John Constable's letter to John Dunthorne, Sr., 29
May 1802
"For the last two years I have been running around
after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand.
I have not endeavored to represent nature with the
same elation of mind with which I set out, but have
rather tried to make my performance look like the work
of other men." ... "There is room enough for a
natural painture. The great vice of the present
day is bravura, an attempt to do something
beyond the truth. Fashion always had, and will have,
its day; but truth in all things only will last, and
can only have just claims on posterity."
Intro to his Lecture 1 to the Royal Institution of
Great Britain, notes taken by C.R. Lewis, 26 May 1836
"...I am anxious that the world should be inclined
to look to painters for information on painting. I
hope to show that ours is a regularly taught
profession; that it is scientific as well as
poetic; that imagination alone never did, and
never can, produce works that are to stand by a
comparison with realities; and to show, by
tracing the connecting links in the history of
landscape painting, that no great painter was ever
self-taught."
[editors note: since this appears out
of context, let me note that I believe him to mean in
his last line that all painters are indebted to their
predecessors]
From his Lecture 3, 9 June 1836
[editors note: speaking of Poussin's
The Deluge]
"The good sense of Poussin, which was equal to his
genius, taught him that by simplicity of treatment,
the most awful subjects may be made far more affecting
than by overloading them with imagery."
"Chiaroscuro is by no means confined to dark
pictures; ... It may be defined as that power which
creates space; we find it everywhere, and at all times
in nature; opposition, union, light, shade, reflection
and refraction, all contribute to it."
From his Lecture 4, 16 June 1836
"It appears to me that pictures have been
over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal
things, and almost as standards by which nature is to
be judged rather than the reverse; and this false
estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant
epithets that have been applied to painters, as 'the
divine', 'the inspired', and so forth. Yet, in
reality, what are the most sublime productions of the
pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature,
and copies of a few of her evanescent effects; and
this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long
and patient study, under the direction of much good
sense. -- It was said by Sir Thomas Lawrence, that 'we
can never hope to compete with nature in the beauty
and delicacy of her separate forms or colours, -- our
only chance lies in selection and combination.'
Nothing can be more true, -- and it may be added, that
selection and combination are learned from nature
herself, who constantly presents us with compositions
of her own, far more beautiful than the happiest
arranged by human skill. I have endeavored to draw a
line between genuine art and mannerism, but even the
greatest painters have never been wholly untainted by
manner. -- Painting is a science, and should be
pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature."
From his Lecture to the Literary and Scientific
Institution at Hampstead, notes taken by C.R. Leslie,
25 July 1836
"The first impression and a natural one is, that
the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as
patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it
will be found that there has often been more money
lavished on them in their worst periods than in their
best, and that the highest honours have frequently
been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now
known."
"The attempt to revive old styles that have existed
in former ages may for a time appear to be successful,
but experience may now surely teach us its
impossibility." ... "It is to be lamented that the
tendency of taste is at present too much towards this
kind of imitation, which, as long as it lasts, can
only act as a blight on art, by engaging talents that
might have stamped the Age with a character of its
own, in the vain endeavor to reanimate deceased Art ,
in which the utmost that can be accomplished will be
to reproduce a body without a soul." |
