John Constable

English painter

• Born: June 11, 1776
• Birthplace: East Bergholt, Suffolk, England
• Died: March 31, 1837
• Place of death: London, England

Constable combined a passion for nature with his conception of an ideal rural England to paint some of the most evocative and poetic landscapes of all time. His paintings have a timeless and rugged beauty that are more impressive now than during his own time, because this ordered world exists only in his landscapes.

Early Life

John Constable was the fourth of the six children of Golding Constable and Ann Watts. Like Rembrandt’s father, Golding Constable was a miller, owner of water mills at Flatford and Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt. He also shipped grain, imported coal, and served on the commission that oversaw shipping on the River Stout. In 1774, he had moved from Flatford to East Bergholt, a mile away, to live the life of a country squire in a newly built mansion.

Young Constable went to schools in Lavenham and Dedham, but his preoccupation with painting from an early age made him an inattentive pupil. Golding Constable had originally intended his second son—John’s older brother was mentally impaired—to become a clergyman, but when the boy proved to be no scholar, it was decided that he should go into milling. Although Constable eventually worked in his father’s mills for only a year, he boasted, as an adult, of his broad, sensitive miller’s thumb, which enabled him to judge a sample of flour by sifting it between his thumb and forefinger.

Constable’s interest in art found considerable encouragement. He was friends with John Dunthorne, an East Bergholt plumber, glazier, and amateur painter. The two often went sketching together. Constable’s mother approved of his ambitions and arranged for him to be introduced to Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter, collector of paintings, and patron of the arts, whose mother lived at Dedham. Beaumont introduced the aspiring artist to landscapes by such painters as Lorrain Claude and Thomas Girtin, allowed Constable to copy his pictures, and kept him up to date on the latest aesthetic debates. In 1796, Constable, while visiting his uncle in Edmonton, met John Thomas Smith, who was working as a drawing master there. Smith encouraged Constable to find the subjects for his landscapes in domestic scenes and taught him to paint what actually appeared rather than invent figures.

When Golding Constable forced his son to work in his countinghouse in 1797, Constable wrote: “I see plainly that it will be my lot to walk through life in a path contrary to that in which my inclination would lead me.” He continued painting, and in 1799 he met a final major influence, Joseph Farington, a pupil of landscape painter Richard Wilson. Farington had him copy the old masters, especially Jacob van Ruysdael, who had influenced Thomas Gainsborough, Constable’s fellow painter of Suffolk landscapes.

That same year, Constable finally began devoting his full energies to art, enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he was to study until 1811. His early landscapes were considered clumsy, and too often, under the pressure of criticism, he subverted his individuality to make his paintings resemble the work of other artists. He painted well enough, however, to receive his first considerable commission, Old Hall, East Bergholt , in 1801.

Life’s Work

In 1802, Constable turned down the post of drawing master at a military academy in High Wycombe. He wrote John Dunthorne that if he had accepted the position, “it would have been a death blow to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love.” That same year, he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy and bought a studio in East Bergholt, near his parents’ house. By 1803, he was convinced that he could produce paintings that “shall be valuable to posterity.”

Because Constable felt compelled to prove to his family that he could make a living as an artist, he began producing life-size portraits in the mornings at East Bergholt, beginning in 1804, while devoting his afternoons to landscapes. The artist described landscape as his “mistress”: “’tis to her I look for fame, and all that the warmth of imagination renders dear to man.” He continued painting portraits for years, and the work he did for hire also included painting the altarpiece for Brantham Church, repairing and copying paintings for Lord Dysart of Helmingham Hall, and painting the background for a portrait by another artist. As late as 1828, he painted a mermaid for an inn sign in Warwickshire.

Constable was breaking new ground by devoting his serious art to the scenery of East Anglia. During this period, the Lake District, North Wales, Scotland, and the Peak District were fashionable for painters; the Stour Valley was not. Constable wanted to paint that into which he had insight, and he thoroughly understood the history, botany, and agriculture of the Stour Valley. Constable’s family found his subjects to be too ordinary and suggested that he paint more dramatic scenery. Such pressure may have resulted in a tour of the Lake District in 1806 that produced six landscapes exhibited at the Royal Academy over the following two years. Golding Constable was unimpressed by his son’s progress and considered him to be “pursuing a shadow.” However, the painter’s father continued to finance his career. Family income supported Constable throughout his life.

Constable, a plain man with a sloping forehead and a beak of a nose, fell in love with Maria Bicknell in 1810. Her father was solicitor to the Admiralty, and her grandfather, the Reverend Dr. Durand Rhudde, was rector of East Bergholt. The wealthy Rhudde opposed his granddaughter’s marriage plans because Constable refused to abandon art and earn a respectable living, and perhaps because of the artist’s friendship with Dunthorne, reputedly an atheist. The Bicknell family gave in to the rector’s wishes because Maria was expected to inherit his fortune. Her parents forbade Maria to meet with Constable, but the two continued to correspond. In 1811, Constable failed to appease Rhudde with a watercolor of his church.

Constable discovered another important inspiration for his landscapes in 1811, when he first visited Salisbury. Constable had met the bishop of Salisbury in 1798, when John Fisher was rector of Langham, and now met the bishop’s nephew, Archdeacon John Fisher, who was to become his closest friend. The younger Fisher was a substitute for the enlightened public Constable hoped for but never found. Through his friendship with Fisher, Constable came to feel the same affection for Salisbury as he had for the Stour Valley. He exhibited Salisbury: Morning at the Royal Academy in 1812.

Despite showing numerous paintings at the Academy, Constable displayed few signs of becoming a professional painter, though he sold paintings for the first time in 1814. His mother’s death the next year was a blow, for she had always sympathized with his ambitions, even though she believed he would have more success as a portrait painter.

Golding Constable died in 1816, and because his son’s share of the estate placed the artist in a better financial situation, the Bicknells agreed to allow their daughter’s marriage. As the wedding day approached, however, Constable began worrying about having less time for his painting and wanted to postpone the ceremony. John Fisher soothed his friend’s fears and married the couple at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London on October 2, 1816. The Constables spent part of their honeymoon with Fisher and his wife at their vicarage in Osmington, Dorsetshire. Maria’s father eventually grew to approve of Constable, and her grandfather relented enough to leave her four thousand pounds. The Constables lived in Hampstead for most of their marriage, and the painter spent his last extended period in East Anglia in the summer of 1817. The first of the couple’s seven children was born at the end of that year.

The White Horse , the first of Constable’s large paintings of a canal scene on the Stour, was well received when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819. Though this success led to his election as an associate member of the Academy, Constable’s full acceptance by this institution, which determined what was officially art in England, was not to come for several years. John Fisher purchased The White Horse and was to buy many more Constable paintings. The artist wrote his friend in 1820, “I should almost faint… when I am standing before my large canvases was I not cheered and encouraged by your friendship and approbation.” He also confided to Fisher that he feared, for his family’s sake, that he would never be a popular artist but must be reconciled to pleasing himself.

Living in Hampstead, Constable felt isolated from his aesthetic roots. “The Londoners with all their ingenuity as artists,” he wrote in 1821, “know nothing of the feeling of a country life (the essence of Landscape)—any more than a hackney coach horse knows of pasture.” This sense of isolation, together with the Royal Academy’s indifference to a man it considered a pretentious amateur obsessed by rural scenery and the lack of economic rewards, led to Constable’s seeing himself as an outsider in the art world. Regarding his failure to be elected to the Academy in 1822 he wrote, “I have nothing to help me but my stark naked merit, and although that (as I am told) far exceeds all the other candidates—it is not heavy enough.”

Constable’s best-known work, The Hay Wain (given its name by Fisher), was shown at the Royal Academy in 1821 and later at the British Institution. This painting, View on the Stour near Dedham , and View on Hampstead Heath were exhibited in Paris in 1824 and were immensely popular. They were acclaimed by French artists, especially Eugène Delacroix, and were awarded a gold medal by Charles X. This success encouraged French art students to show more interest in landscapes.

When Constable began selling his works to the Paris dealers John Arrowsmith and Claude Schroth in 1824, he was finally making money. A disagreement with Arrowsmith the next year, however, ended their relationship, and Schroth went out of business soon afterward. Constable’s relative lack of success was as much the result of his personality as of his unfashionableness in English art circles. He had a reputation for being difficult with patrons and for being coarse and slanderous about his fellow artists. He is reported to have been a malicious gossip and was disliked by many for his sarcasm. In addition, he referred to his paintings as his “children” and was unwilling to part with art he considered successful. He wrote that he loved such paintings too well “to expose them to the taunts of the ignorant.”

Constable’s financial problems were solved unexpectedly in 1827 by the death of his father-in-law, who left a larger fortune than had been anticipated. This burden lifted, Constable wrote, “I shall stand before a 6 foot canvas with a mind at ease (thank God).”

This ease of mind, however, was short-lived. Worn out by childbearing—the last was born in January, 1828—Maria Constable, who had for years suffered from tuberculosis, died November 23, 1828, at forty-one. Constable was devastated by her death, and his landscapes began to become lonelier, more distanced; he increasingly saw nature as unstable. His mourning of Maria can be seen in Hadleigh Castle. The Mouth of the Thames—morning after a stormy night (1829). The aftermath of a storm, the ruined castle, and a lonely shepherd reflect his mental state, his sadness at the impermanence of human endeavor.

Constable was at last elected to the Royal Academy in 1829 but by only a single vote. Sir Thomas Lawrence, president of the Academy, told him that he was lucky to have been elected at all, because several painters of historical subjects—considered superior to landscape artists—had also been under consideration. Fisher called his friend’s election “the triumph of real Art over spurious Art… of patient moral integrity over bare chicanery.” The very next year, the Academy’s hanging committee, of which Constable was a member, rejected his Watermeadows at Salisbury as a “nasty green thing.”

After exhibiting the unusually large number of eight paintings at the Royal Academy in 1832, Constable began to work less because of rheumatism. He also experienced more sadness as both John Fisher and John Dunthorne, who had become his assistant, died. Constable called his friendship with Fisher “the pride—the honour—and grand stimulus of my life.”

Constable died, probably of angina, on March 31, 1837. While working on Arundel Mill and Castle three days before, he is reported to have said, “It is neither too warm nor too cold, too light nor too dark, and this constitutes everything in a picture.”

Significance

John Constable’s closest friend in his final years was the American painter C. R. Leslie, who published a biography of him in 1843, despite his belief that the English public would be indifferent to his subject. Although Constable labored under the shadows of his fellow landscapists Thomas Gainsborough and J. M. W. Turner, his genius was occasionally recognized during his lifetime. Critic Robert Hunt referred to him as the quintessentially English painter in 1823, and The Times, in 1827, called him “unquestionably the first landscape painter of the day.”

Throughout his career, Constable was discouraged by his lack of recognition, though he occasionally agreed with critics that his landscapes were not as finished as they might have been. His work was not appreciated, according to Constable, because it “flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal de lal or fiddle de dee, how then can I hope to be popular?” He was confident, however, that his art would eventually be recognized. While painting Trees Near Hampstead Church in 1821, he commented that the painting would one day be worth as much as the field it depicted.

Constable’s reputation increased slowly after his death, but it did not begin to assume its present status until 1888, when one of his daughters gave nearly one hundred paintings and three hundred drawings to the Victoria and Albert Museum. These paintings, unseen by the public for half a century, could then be appreciated because of similar work done in the interim, especially by the French Impressionists. By this time, however, these artists had forgotten how Constable had influenced their mentors during the 1820’s.

Constable’s landscapes reflect what Leslie called a “peculiarly social” view of nature, because he painted scenes abounding in human associations. His paintings are full of cottages, farmhouses, churches, boats, wagons, and human figures, almost always in motion, engaged in some worthwhile activity. The interrelatedness of humans and nature reflects the artist’s view of an ordered, moral world. The inseparability of humanity and nature in Constable’s art has led many to see his work as the equivalent of the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. The power of his paintings comes in part from their being reminiscences of places to which Constable was emotionally attached. Such qualities help engender in his art a timeless, rugged beauty more impressive now than during his own time, because this ordered world exists only in his landscapes.

Bibliography

Constable, John. John Constable’s Correspondence. 6 vols. Edited by R. B. Beckett. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1962-1976. Main source of biographical information about the painter. These volumes include substantial explanatory material.

Cormack, Malcolm. Constable. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986. This critical biography emphasizes Constable’s part in the Romantic movement and his scientific attitude toward landscape, particularly in relation to weather. Beautifully illustrated.

Fleming-Williams, Ian, and Leslie Parris. The Discovery of Constable. London: Holmes & Meier, 1984. Explains Constable’s gradual rise to fame in the century following his death. Examines the role of his descendants in the reappraisal of his work. Also looks at his forgers and imitators.

Gadney, Reg. Constable and His World. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Brief overview of Constable’s life and career; for general readers.

Lambert, Ray. John Constable and the Theory of Landscape Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lambert studies Constable’s landscapes and relevant writings to determine how the artist’s aesthetic ideas led him to create landscape art.

Leslie, C. R. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R.A. London: J. Carpenter, 1843. 3d ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Biography by the artist’s close friend, first published in 1843. Based primarily upon Constable’s substantial correspondence.

Parkinson, Ronald. John Constable: The Man and His Art. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1998. A series of essays about Constable, including an analysis of his paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, his way of working, and his influence on other artists.

Peacock, Carlos. John Constable: The Man and His Work. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1965. Rev. ed. 1971. This three-part study looks at Constable’s life, Romanticism, and the artist’s relation to the sea. Discusses his influence on French painting.

Reynolds, Graham. Constable: The Natural Painter. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Analysis of Constable’s work interwoven with biographical information in study by the then-keeper of the Constable collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Rosenthal, Michael. Constable. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Covers the highlights of Constable’s life while providing an overview of his work. Emphasizes the social, political, and moral context of Constable’s art.

Thornes, John E. John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science. Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Press, 1999. Thornes, a meteorologist, analyzes Constable’s sky and weather paintings from a meterological perspective.