John Constable

Master painter John Constable – some events in his life

John Constable (1776-1837) is one of the great English landscape painters of the 19th century. His father was a landowning miller from East Bergholt in the Stour valley.
Constable continued working in the family business until 1798, when he moved to London. He enrolled in the Royal Academy schools in 1800 and exhibited his first works in 1802. He made a tour of Westmorland and Cumberland in 1806, sketching in pencil, ink wash and occasional watercolors with many notes on light and atmosphere; and this was how he worked for the next ten years, patiently refining his art. He met Maria Bicknell in 1811 and  married her in 1816. In 1819 he was elected to the Royal Academy. He settled in Hampstead in 1820. Constable began painting more frequently in watercolors, producing larger and more finished works, as well as many “blot paintings” after the manner of Alexander Cozens. He died in his Somerset House, at age 60.

Many of Constable’s sketches capture unusual effects of lighting (such as a double rainbow) or weather over the panorama of London he enjoyed from the terrace or back window of his home in Hampstead. Later in life (1821), Constable wrote that “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment … the sky is the source of light in nature, and governs everything.”

Many of Constable’s watercolour sketches were probably finished indoors, based on notes and chalk drawings made in the field (a method also used by J.M.W. Turner). These were a painter’s working documents, quick studies of composition or colour, preparation for Constable’s works in oil, and were not known until after his death.

Constable’s painting of Stonehenge is perhaps the largest and most finished watercolor that he ever made; it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836. Constable proudly called it “a beautiful drawing” and based it on many careful pencil sketches. He uses his favorite device of placing a light coloured foreground against a dark sky, where it dominates the mood of the image. The double rainbow was fascinating to Constable and appears in cloud studies made at Hampstead. The sky is painted roughly, in a manner that suggests both gusting winds and ragged remnants of rain high in the sky, and contributes to a sense of keen natural observation without slavish copying of natural effects. With its combination of Newton’s rainbow and the mysterious ancient stones, the painting reflects Constable’s unique ability to combine scientific knowledge and keen observation with poetry and originality. Constable was never a painter of facts: for him the eyes were secondary, “it is the soul that sees.”

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