Impression

English painter, ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists.

John Constable was born at East Bergholt, a Suffolk village which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows with scattered flocks and herds, its well cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all this made the place extremely charming and elegant in the eyes of the boy. “These scenes of my boyhood”, he wrote, “made me a painter”.

Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote.

Only during the 1820s he began to win recognition which came to him abroad: The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency.

After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original language of painting from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected what he called the `poetic diction' of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always `running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'. Constable thought that `No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world', and in a then new way he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: `The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things”.

In his attempts to reproduce the unceasing movement and even the shimmer of light upon things, Constable tried to achieve his object by a sort of granular effect, a scattering of white dots over his canvas. This novelty shocked critics who often reproached him with his “whitewash”. Some critics criticised him for vulgarity, heaviness and the unfinished state of his pictures.

He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. His masterpieces are: “Flatford Mill”, “Dedham Lock”, “Cornfield”, “Brighton Beach”, “The Leaping Horse”. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush.

Constable wrote: “Painting is with me but another word for feeling”. He created for himself a direct, intense technique of expression: pure pigments aligned in slender touches, or, especially in his last pictures, - in patches splayed on the canvas with a knife. He created the process which his friends called Constable’s “snow”, the tiny white dots which rendered scintillation of light on moist surfaces. This simple technique or the painter’s proud desire to be alone with Nature, is the most precious thing which Constable bequeathed to modern art.

Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works--`six-footers' as he called them--he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork.

The sensation of vitality produced by Constable’s pictures results from his deep insight into natural forces whose harmony makes a landscape. The sky for Constable was not only an arrangement of colours, it was alive and in harmony with the earth. And Constable explains: “I have often been advised to consider my sky as a white sheet thrown behind the objects – but it must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. 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”.

Constable was the first to introduce pure green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow or more often brown glasses.

Constable’s sparkles of light and colour and the deliberate roughness of texture broke with the tradition of smooth painting.

Constable’s communion with nature reminds one of Wordworth’s poetry, calm and deep. Constable felt, saw and expressed the beauty of the English countryside in its most lasting and deep-rooted forms. And most of the 19^th century painters acknowledged their debt to him.

In England Constable had no real sucessor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel, 1825-87) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics such as Delacroix, on the painters of the Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists.

How do you understand the following lines from the text?

Constable’s great originality matured slowly.

He was grudgingly made a full Academician.

Constable developed his own original language of painting.

Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always `running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'.

Critics often reproached him with his “whitewash”.

To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush.

The painter’s proud desire to be alone with Nature is the most precious thing which Constable bequeathed to modern art.

Constable was the first to introduce pure green into painting.

Constable’s sparkles of light and colour and the deliberate roughness of texture broke with the tradition of smooth painting.

Constable’s communion with nature reminds one of Wordworth’s poetry, calm and deep.

Comment on the painter’s words quoted in the text:

“These scenes of my boyhood made me a painter”

“No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world”

“Painting is with me but another word for feeling”

“I have often been advised to consider my sky as a white sheet thrown behind the objects – but it must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. 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”.