John Constable: the life and paintings of the master of the English landscape

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The fate of this artist is amazing. During his lifetime, he did not achieve worthy recognition in his homeland, and today John Constable is one of the most beloved and famous British landscape painters.

East Suffolk, whose views became the main content of his canvases, is called Constable Country - Constable's Land.

Son of a miller

June 11, 1776 in the south-east of England, in East Bergholt, in a family that owned several flour mills, the future singer of English landscapes John Constable was born. His biography is full of opposition to life circumstances. From childhood, his favorite pastime was walking around the neighborhood with an album, where he tried to portray the surrounding nature, but his father assumed that John would become the successor of the family business. He did not immediately reconcile with his decision to enter the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and devote himself to the precarious craft of the artist.

He spent most of his time at the academy doing independent work on location and studying the works of masters of the past. The influence of the work of Claude Lorrain, Rubens, Jacob van Ruysdael, Annibale Carraci, passion for poetry led to the fact that JohnConstable developed a special manner of depicting nature, full of poetry and romanticism.

The revival of the genre

The Dutch landscape of the 17th century is the moment of brief glory of this type of paintings. Portraits and paintings on historical and mythological themes were the main genres for artists and the public of that time. John Constable, whose works depicted the rural landscapes of the English outback familiar to him, along with Turner and other masters, was at the forefront of a revival of interest in the landscape. He tried to paint portraits and religious subjects to improve his financial situation, but did not achieve this success. It was his landscapes, full of a special emotional component, that became the main content of his work, which was ignored for a long time at home.

Critics noted the high merits of the paintings that John Constable exhibited at different times: "Arable Field" (1826), "White Horse" (1819), "View of Salisbury Cathedral" (1831). But they did not accept his unusual freehand style of writing and the "low" theme of most of his works.

Style innovation

The master's creative method was ahead of its time. For the first time, he spent a lot of time working in the open air, observing nature and finding the right color combinations. His sketches, which preceded the writing of paintings in the studio, are considered by many to be the first experience of painting with oil paints in the open air.

His attention to the condition of the sky and clouds was in the nature of meteorological observations. Numerous field sketchesaccompanied by records of the state of the weather, characteristics of physical phenomena in the atmosphere. This gave amazing results. In all his landscapes, John Constable uses the sky not as a neutral background, but as a powerful means of emotional impact, impressing with the realism of the image.

The painting technique was also unusual. Applying embossed colorful strokes at different angles, he achieved hitherto unseen effects. The energy that such a manner gave birth to will be used by the masters of the next generations, the first of which will be the Impressionists. And then John Constable, whose paintings were called unfinished by critics, was accused of negligence and unprofessionalism.

Paris Glory

And yet his work found the right response from his contemporaries. In 1824, 4 paintings by Constable were exhibited at the Paris Salon, among which was The Hay Cart. A small genre scene from rural life was only part of a landscape impressive with realism and dramatic emotion.

This canvas was admired by the great French romanticists: Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix. The skill of the Englishman had a strong influence on their painting, they began to use his techniques in their works. Constable was able to sell about twenty of his paintings in France.

Personal drama

But the main thing for the master was recognition at home. His financial situation improved after receiving the inheritance, but it was never completely stable. He was considered an unfavorable match for Maria Bicknell, whom he knew andloved since childhood. All her relatives protested against her marriage, which was concluded in 1816.

The bright period in Constable's family life was overshadowed by the poor he alth of his beloved wife. From the death of Mary (1828), he was never able to recover and wore mourning until the end of his life. Many of his paintings, created in the last period of his life, also acquired a gloomy character. John Constable died in 1837 and was buried next to Mary.

Master's Legacy

In many ways Constable was an innovator. He was against the belief of his contemporaries that the main thing in the landscape is imagination. His accuracy in depicting nature, where it is easy to identify the type of tree or plant, the use of meteorological observations to realistically depict weather conditions, makes him a man of the Enlightenment that came along with the industrial revolution.

The choice of the main theme for the canvases also speaks of novelty. For the first time, an artist appeared who proclaimed the value of the natural world, which is exposed to man. This topic became more and more relevant with the development of cities, with the growth of the power of people.

Reformist ways of reflecting the surrounding world by the end of the 19th century led to the emergence of a new Impressionist painting. Many of them named John Constable among their direct predecessors.