Constable, John
NAME: Constable, John.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Great landscape painter
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 11th June 1776, East Bergholt, Suffolk, England.
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 31st March 1837, London, England. Aged 61.
DISCIPLINE: Painter.
FIELD: Art.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Golding Constable and Ann Watts.
SIBLINGS: Two brothers, Golding and Abram, three sisters, Ann, Martha and Mary.
SPOUSE: Maria Bicknell.
CHILDREN: Four sons, John, Charles, Alfred and Lionel, four daughters, Maria Louisa, Isabel and Emily.
EDUCATION: Lavenham Grammar School, Suffolk. Dedham Day School, Suffolk. Royal Academy, London.
MAJOR WORK: "The Hay Wain", "View on the Stour near Dedham", "The Leaping Horse", "The Cornfield", "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows".
LIFE AND TIMES: John Constable grew up in England, on the borders of Suffolk and Essex, surrounded by the beauty of the countryside and the bustle of a prosperous agricultural community. His mother arranged an introduction for him to a local landowner, Sir George Beaumont, a rich and cultured man who was friendly with Sir Joshua Reynolds* and Gainsborough* and who had an excellent art collection.
It had become clear that Constable wanted to pursue life as an artist, so his parents agreed that he should go to London. In 1799, aged twenty-three, he was accepted as a student at the Royal Academy School in London.
He worked hard, following the Academy tradition of copying the Masters, attending life classes, and amassing his own collection of copies of great art. West*, the president of the Academy, was sympathetic to Constable and advised him to turn down a job teaching art in the country.
In 1801, he met the poet Wordsworth* at a sketching exhibition in Derbyshire, North England. That summer, Constable decided to paint in Suffolk, using his own style, rather than copying that taught at the Academy. He completed "Dedham Vale" and began to exhibit annually at the Academy.
In 1803 he sailed from London around the coast of the English Channel, studying the changing weather during the month's voyage. Passing Chatham, Kent, he made sketches of the British Fleet, including the "Victory". He later used these drawings for the battle scene of Trafalgar, which he painted and exhibited at the Academy in 1806.
In the same year, he went on another sketching trip to the northern Lake District.
At the end of his training, Constable had to make a living. The problem was that studies of changing weather weren't particularly popular, and his landscape pictures of the English countryside and its agricultural life were not acceptable in traditional art circles.
He spent time living in London and made long visits to Suffolk each summer. During these visits he made oil sketches and drawings (now considered among his best work) of scenes he planned to paint later. In 1809, he fell in love with Maria Bicknell, the twenty-one-year old granddaughter of an East Anglian vicar.
Constable struggled to develop a style of his own and, in 1814, he painted his first two masterpieces. He was commissioned by a local squire to paint a scene that would remind his daughter of home when she moved to London. The result was "Stour Valley and Dedham Village", which expressed both his love of the East Anglian countryside and his attitude to the dignity of labour. The second masterpiece was "Boat Building Near Flatford Mill", painted in the open air.
In 1816, Constable's father died, and with the additional income he began to receive, he and Maria married. He now had the confidence to paint the large pictures he had always planned.
The first of these was "Flatford Mill on the River Stour", in 1817. He began to work on what, unintentionally, became a series of large scenes on the River Stour. The first, "The White Horse" was exhibited at the Academy in 1819. In the same year, he was at last made an Associate of the Royal Academy. Constable considered his next large picture, "Stratford Mill" as his best painting for some years, and so did the art critics. "The Hay Wain" was exhibited in 1821 and, although now one of the most famous paintings in the world, aroused little interest at the time.
Maria's health was delicate so the family moved to a cottage in Hampstead, a suburb of London. Constable found that it was a good place to paint the sky, one of his passions. He became fascinated by the work of Luke Howard, a Quaker manufacturer of chemicals who, in 1803, had named the varieties of clouds with the names by which they are still known: cirrus, nimbus, and cumulus. In 1822, Constable made fifty sky studies (work which he called "skying") and his next large painting, "View on the Stour near Dedham", further developed this interest in clouds.
In 1824, he sold the "Hay Wain" and "View on the Stour near Dedham" to a Paris dealer. The sale provided much-needed money for Constable's growing family. When the "Hay Wain” was exhibited in the Paris Salon together with Delacroix's* "Massacre at Chios", both works became the talk of the exhibition. Delacroix had seen Constable's work and had imitated his use of pure colour, applied with short, dry brush strokes so as to create luminosity. The next year, Delacroix called on Constable when he came to England and saw "The Leaping Horse," one of Constable’s finest works.
Although the president of the Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence*, called on Constable in his studio, in 1826 he failed to be elected as a member. Finally, in 1829, the painter Turner* visited him, with the news that he had at last been made a full member of the R.A. Constable began work on a book of mezzotints of his works, called "The English Landscape", which was well received.
Some of his later works, including "Salisbury Cathedral", were freer in brushwork and more highly-coloured than earlier work, but were criticised as being poor imitations of Turner. His main works of his last years include "Cottage in a Cornfield", 1833 and "The Valley Farm", 1836, which both recall the countryside of his youth.
ASSESSMENT: Constable was not appreciated as one of the most significant landscape painters of his time until after his death.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: John Constable, greatest English landscape painter
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Constable, Freda, John Constable, Terence Dalton Ltd. Lavenham, Suffolk, 1975.