Constable Country

...It was then that the painter determined to achieve greater recognition (and charge higher prices) by painting works on the same large scale that Turner was doing, but without "the great vice of the present day . . . bravura, an attempt at something beyond the truth...

...Rather than looking at the viewer, Constable is gazing in the direction of his first paintings of East Bergholt in the Stour River Valley...

...While Golding expected that the younger man would follow in the family business, he did not oppose John's decision to become an artist...

...Constable needed to make his paintings attract more attention, both at first glance and at a distance...

...One of the first results of this conviction is the National Gallery's own "Wivenhoe Park, Essex," a panoramic view of a friend's estate...

...In these words we have a clear expression of the Romantic notion that the true artist must possess an original vision, yet at the same time this vision must be grounded in the study of nature...

...Constable painted most of it outdoors, which was unusual for the time...

...Over the next decade he produced a half-dozen works which he called his "six footers," each beginning life as full-scale sketch...

...There is room enough for a natural painter...

...With its crumbling ruins and bleak overcast sky, this is the most obviously Romantic of all Constable's paintings, but the artist has earned his right to paint it: This was the work that resulted in his full appointment to the Academy...

...Here is a simple narrative of a tow horse being ferried Constable's Great Landscape The Six-Foot Paintings National Gallery ofArt, October 1-December 31, 2006 The Huntington Library February 3-April 29, 2007 from one bank of the river to another on a serene summer day...

...Here is a painter who deserves to be considered with the late Titian, with Velazquez, and with Rembrandt, as one of those masters who invests oils with life-enhancing emotion...

...Toward the end of the series, Constable realized the need to develop other subjects...

...Here we have the beginnings of one of Constable's greatest insights: That nature never stands still, and the painter who would capture it must learn to show its movement...

...Although painted completely in his London studio, based on sketches he made a few years earlier, the work is evocative of the lush, precise, and emotionally charged details that Constable loved...

...Located in Suffolk in the southeast of England, this was the region where the painter grew up, and which would come to be known as "Constable Country...

...This was a painting Constable greatly admired for the "joyous and animated character" Rubens imparted to the sky, filling it with departing showers and rainbows...

...Turner's bravura creations in oils or water-colors are showstop-pers wherever they are displayed, while Constable's quiet idyllic scenes of the countryside have come to typify all that is best about England for the English...

...There never seemed any question in the young man's mind that he would be a landscape painter, and he soon was learning to paint in accordance with the pastoral conventions laid out by the 17th-century masters of landscape, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacob van Ruisdael...

...When Maria Constable became ill, the family summered at Brighton for the sea air...

...Yet it gave Constable no end of trouble, so much so that, out of fear of failure, he said his prayers before it every night...

...The National Gallery of Art, which has already offered focused surveys of artists who established or enlarged the standards of great painting—in their exhibitions "Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and The Renaissance of Venetian Painting" and "Cezanne in Provence"—now presents a show devoted to the crowning achievements of one of England's premier artists...

...Despite his aversion to bravura painting, the drama here comes, in part, from its dynamic handling...

...By juxtaposing the sketches with the finished works, this extraordinary exhibit illuminates how Constable liberated landscape painting from the leaden conventions and restrictive traditions under which it had labored...

...The serene mood of these early works gives way in "The Leaping Horse" to a powerful, dramatic image of a boy on a horse struggling to jump over a barrier, making it the pictorial and emotional climax of the entire series...

...like Constable, who believed that "painting is but another name for feeling...

...Curator Franklin Kelly has hung each sketch next to its finished version, allowing an unprecedented look into the early stage of an artistic idea...

...Both of these emotions are reflected in "Chain Pier, Brighton," which depicts the remains of the old fishing village in the foreground, juxtaposed with luxury resort hotels rising in the distance, all under an overwhelmingly stormy sky...

...The sheer painterly pleasure that Constable took in his method is clearly evident, and since the parts of the sketches frequently clamor and shout for our separate attention, we can better appreciate the dramatic unity which he imposed on the finished work...

...The house that figures so prominently in this and other works had earlier belonged to a man who lived his entire seventy years in Flatford...

...Here it ought to be said that this is the first time these full-size sketches and the finished paintings have been brought together in an exhibition, and that it is highly unlikely they will be so assembled again...

...A small self-portrait opens the show...

...Constable's father, Golding, was a prominent coal and grain merchant who owned many of the mills along the river which his son was to paint...

...The exhibit follows a chronological path, which is essential with an artist Joseph Phelan, editor of Artcyclopedia.com, teaches at the Catholic University of America...

...Constable was moved by the magnificence of the sea, but he also found the whole resort depressing...

...The most moving of the late paintings, "Hadleigh Castle," a picture of medieval ruin overlooking the Thames, is a homage to Constable's recently deceased wife...

...Henceforth, landscape painting could serve as a vehicle for the expression of the powerful feelings, the sentiments and moods of modern life...

...Yet early in Constable's career we see the temperamental and nonconformist artist bridling at having to learn solely from conventional artistic practices, and vowing that in his case, Nature would be his ultimate teacher...

...In 1809, Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, courting her against the opposition of her family until they finally married seven years later...

...Many areas are worked out roughly with a palette knife...

...Walking through it is like reading Constable's autobiography...

...He had been to this site only once, in 1814, during their difficult courtship period, and in a letter to Maria, he mentions the "melancholy grandeur" of the view...

...We see a handsome young man with a confident look, large aquiline nose, firm chin, and long sideburns who might have stepped out of a Jane Austen novel...

...When it was exhibited the following spring, "The White Horse" was greeted with more praise than Constable had ever received, and the Royal Academy elected him as an associate member...

...by Joseph Phelan Last year, when the BBC asked listeners to vote on the greatest painting in Britain, the winner was Joseph Mallord William Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire," followed closely by John Constable's "The Haywain...

...In 1802 Constable declared his artistic independence: "I shall shortly return to Bergholt where I shall make some laborious sketches from nature...

...For these past two years," he wrote, "I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand...

...Constable recreated the area around Flatford Mill, which was his father's first home and the place where Constable's siblings were born...

...To be a serious painter at the turn of the 19th century meant going to London to study at the Royal Academy, which Constable entered in 1799...

...Walk into the next gallery and look at the first of these large canvases, "The White Horse...

...These results came as no surprise since these two artists, rivals born within a year of each other, were linked together in their lifetimes and ever since...

...Here in America, despite having some of Constable's best work in collections from Connecticut to California, the average museum-goer is much less familiar with him than with the Romantic Delacroix, our own Hudson River School, or the great Impressionists Monet and Pissarro, all of whom were influenced by Constable to one degree or another...

...I have . . . endeavored to make my performance look as if really executed by other men...

...The work has both the finely executed brushwork and careful arrangement of details, which Constable learned from his teachers...

...By using a low viewpoint, he made the horse and rider seem almost monumental, recalling the noble tradition of equestrian portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, and Velazquez...

...Clearly a metaphor for the tradition and continuity to which Constable was extremely sensitive, this, like all his best work, is rooted in the emotional associations of his "careless boyhood...

...The couple settled in London, where Constable had a studio...

...The central picture in the series, and Constable's most famous painting, is "The Haywain," a picture of a hay cart crossing a ford, which owes something to Rubens's "View of Het Steen in the Early Morning" in London's National Gallery...

...But this is not a conventional work, as you can see by studying the different shades of green Constable employs for the trees and the level of specificity he gives to the details...

...In order to work out his composition on a large scale, and at the same time keep it fresh and vital, he believed a full-scale sketch was necessary...

...The clouds, which we see scudding across the sky, cast long shadows on the countryside, making the radiance of the day even more beautiful...

...Constable's intention was to bring the truth of nature and the truth of the heart closer together than any painter before him...