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John Constable
(Jun.11, 1776 - Mar.31, 1837) English Oil Painting Artist Biography.
John Constable was one of the major European landscape artists of the 19th century although he did not achieved much fame during his lifetime in England, his own country. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799 when he entered the Royal Academy Schools and as a student he copied the Old Master landscape oil paintings. Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. Iit was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married after a seven-year courtship and in the face of strong opposition from her family. His wife died in 1828 and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency. During the 1820s he began to win recognition, The Hay Wain, won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Eugene Delacroix among others.
After spending some years working in the oil painting tradition of landscape painting, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition of the Dutch 17th century landscape oil painters. Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who he said, were always "running after paintings and seeking the truth at second hand". Constable thought that "No two days are alike, nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world", and in a then new way he represented in oil paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky. "The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter." To a greater degree than any other artist before him, Constable based his oil paintings on precisely drawn sketches made directly from nature.
He never went abroad and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow and the drama of storms with a rapid brush.
John Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished oil paintings were produced in the art studio. For his most ambitious works," six-footers" as he called them, he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. The full-size sketch for The Hay Wain is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which has the finest collection of Constable's work. After 1816 he changed the method of his work turning away from realistic agrarian landscapes and was working mostly in his studio in London, working out the image from his memory, starting each oil painting from a full-size sketch. The sketches enabled his memory to develop gradually until everything he could remember about the scene put on canvas, at this point he would begin the finished oil painting. Each of his large oil canvas, The Hay Wain (1821, National Gallery, London) and the Leaping Horse (1824) was done in this way.
In England, Constable had no real successor and the many imitators, including his son Lionel. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics such as Delacroix, on the painters of the Barbizon School and ultimately on the Impressionist movement, enough to classify him as one of the worlds artist.
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Golding Constables Flower Garden
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Weymouth Bay
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The Hay Wain
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Leaping Horse
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