Constable
The mainstream of English painting in the first half of the nineteenth
century was landscape, Constable and Turner, the greatest of the landscapists,
approached nature with excitement. At that time nature was beginning to be swallowed
up by the expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution.
John Constable, the son of
a miller on the River Stour in Suffolk, honoured all that was natural and
traditional, including the age-old occupation of farmer, miller, and carpenter,
close to the land whose fruits and forces they turned to human use. He loved
the poetic landscapes of Gainsborough, he studied the constructed compositions
of the Baroque, he admired Ruisdael's skies. Rebelling against the brown
tonality then fashionable in landscape painting - actually the result of
discoloured varnish darkening the Old Masters - he supplemented his
observations of nature with a study of the vivacity of Rubens's colour and
brushwork.
As early as 1802, Constable
started to record the fleeing aspects of the sky in the rapid oil sketches
made outdoors. "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which
sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of
sentiment," he wrote. Constable systematically studied cloud formation in
1821-22. These studies show his surrender to the forces of nature, a passionate
self-identification with sunlight, wind, and moisture.
Constable never left
England and made dutiful sketching tours through regions of acknowledged scenic
beauty. His superb The Hay Wain, of 1821, sums up his ideals and his achievements. Composed as if
accidentally - though on the basis of many preliminary outdoor studies - the
picture, painted in the studio, shows Constable's beloved Stour with its trees,
a mill, and distant fields. In his orchestra of natural colour the solo
instrument and conductor at once is the sky. The clouds sweep by, full of light
and colour, and their shadows and the sunlight spot the field with green and
gold. As the stream ripples, it mirrors now the trees, now the sky. The trees
are made up of many shades of green and patches of light reflect from their
foliage. These white highlights were called "Constable's snow". The Hay Wain was
triumphantly exhibited at the Salon of 1824, where Constable's broken colour and
free brushwork set in motion a new current in French landscape art, which
later culminated in the Impressionist movement. In 1829 Constable became
member of the Royal Academy.
In later life, after the
death of his wife, Constable entered a period of depression in which his
passionate communion with nature reached a pitch of semi-mystical intensity.
One of his late pictures is Stroke-by-Nayland, of 1836-37, a large canvas in which the distant church tower, the wagon,
the plough, the horses, and the boy looking over the gate are instruments on
which light plays. The symphonic breadth, of the picture, and its crushing chords of colour
painted in a rapid technique, bring to the finished painting the immediacy of
the colour sketch. Such pictures are equalled in earlier art only by certain landscape
backgrounds in Titian or by the mythical reveries of the late Rembrandt.
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