My Art History: John Constable

Sunday, October 3, 2021

My Art History: John Constable

One of Constable's "Six-Footers":
Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
59.7”x74.7”, oil on canvas, 1831
National Gallery, Tate UK
(read its story here)

In the last “My Art History” post, I wrote about the Romantic painter, Turner. John Constable (1776-1837) was of that same period, but his sensibility was entirely different. Although I would classify him also as a Romantic, his landscapes, steeped in the pastoral and picturesque, mostly lack any depiction of the sublime, which was a hallmark of Turner's later work.

Constable took landscape painting into a new direction. He meticulously studied the natural landscape, going on-location to gather reference material. Unlike some other landscape artists of the time, who went into the field with a similar goal, he was the first to make his plein air sketches in oil. From these well-observed field notes, he constructed his larger paintings, his “Six-Footers,” often first creating full-size sketches to explore composition before embarking on the finished works.

His working methods inspired many later landscape painters—the Barbizon School painters and the French Impressionists—to observe the landscape with a fresh eye: "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.”

Constable was a homebody. Although he traveled some, he preferred to paint where he lived, in Dedham Vale, on the Essex-Suffolk border, now often called “Constable Country.” He wrote a friend, “ I should paint my own places best.”

Personally, I dislike this large studio paintings; they seem overly-designed and staged and lack the freshness of his field studies. They are, however, well-observed, thanks to all his work in the field. His cloud studies, I think, are some of the best. Clouds are notoriously difficult to study, as they are mutable and fickle subjects. I've found that it's often best not to paint clouds right away, but to just watch, to discern a pattern in their movements and shape-shifting, before committing to paper or canvas.

Here are a few of Constable's cloud studies, followed by a couple of my own.