John Constable

1776 - 1837 • English • Painter • Romantic

"Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?" - John Constable

When he was 26 Constable made a momentous decision to devote himself to painting. He wished to concentrate on what he called "natural painture," by which he meant the "pure and unaffected" portrayal of the English countryside. He worked outdoors, sketching in OIL, to capture the immediacy of a scene. The Haywain (1821), his famous rural idyll, exemplifies his desire to show both a distinctive place and a particular time; the title he originally gave the work was Landscape: Noon. "No two days are alike, not even two hours; neither were there ever any two leaves alike since the creation of the world," he said. His "scientific" observations included sketches of cloud formations, and he studied the effect of light and atmosphere on the sky as well as the countryside. After his wife died, in 1828, Constable's work became more turbulent. The oil sketch Hadleigh Castle (1828-29) is of a ruined castle by the sea; it expresses disaster and desolation in subject, mood, and technique. Constable used a palette knife to apply the paint, and the surface is flecked with white daubs, called "Constable's snow," that further agitate appearance and affect. Constable conceded both his own melancholy-"How for some wise purpose is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me "-and the consolation painting brought: "My canvas soot es me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly and worse." Constable concentrated on rural scenes of farming during a period when the Industrial Revolution was actually wreaking havoc on the landscape and on the lives of country people. This was especially true in his native Suffolk. While he acknowledged those troubles in writing, no overt sign of them appears on the canvas-unless one reads them, by inference, into elements such as storms and ruins.