John Constable
Painter of the English countryside.
Constable painted Suffolk with cloud studies and fresh greens. His outdoor sketches point towards Impressionism.
John Constable was born in 1776 in East Bergholt in Suffolk. His father owned mills and traded in corn, among other places at Flatford Mill on the River Stour. John first worked in the family business, but he wanted to be a painter and was finally allowed to enter the Royal Academy Schools in 1799. The landscape around the River Stour became the subject of his life. He said himself that those places had made him a painter.
Success came slowly. For a long time he sold almost nothing and lived on support from his family. He fell in love with Maria Bicknell, but her family opposed the marriage for many years because his prospects were thought poor. They married only in 1816 and had seven children. From 1819 he began painting large canvases, almost two metres wide, to attract attention at the Academy's exhibitions. The first was The White Horse (1819), now in the Frick Collection in New York.
His best-known work is The Hay Wain (1821) in the National Gallery in London, which shows a horse-drawn cart crossing the river by a farmhouse. When it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824 it won a gold medal and impressed Delacroix and other French artists. Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (1823) is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has the largest collection of his work.
Constable studied nature at first hand. He painted oil sketches outdoors and in the 1820s, at Hampstead, made a series of cloud studies on which he noted the date, time and weather. He wanted to capture light glittering on leaves and water and put small white flecks of paint on the canvas, which critics called “Constable's snow”. When Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828 he was plunged into deep grief. The following year he was at last made a full Academician. He died in 1837.
During his lifetime Constable was more appreciated in France than in England. His studies of nature inspired the Barbizon School and later the Impressionists. Today he is, together with Turner, England's best-known landscape painter, and the area around Flatford is called “Constable Country”.