CONSTABLE
(1776-1837)
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON
JOHN CONSTABLE, R.A., the most famous of English landscape realists
and the contemporary of the great landscape idealist, Turner, was born
at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, the county of Gainsborough. Constable's
father, a wealthy mill-owner, offered to educate the boy for the Church, but
noting his disinclination for such a career, put him in the counting-house. Develop-
ing an early love of art, the future painter became a student at the Royal Academy,
where he was encouraged by the President of the institution, the American Sir
Benjamin West. He was chosen an associate of the Academy in 1819 and rose to
full membership ten years later. The most brilliant success of his uneventful life in
the way of recognition came in 1824, when the exhibition of two pictures in the Paris
Salon, brought forth applause and the tribute of imitation on the part of his French
brothers in art. Constable frankly accepts natural phenomena as in themselves
sufficient for an effect or image of beauty. Not that he copies external appearances
or records the mere literal facts of nature. On the contrary, while confining his sub-
jects mainly to the cultivated regions of England, his thought is in the sky and on the
wing, as well as based on earth. He loves elemental subjects, like the vivid play of
light amidst the clouds and upon the moist greenery of old England, and he can
characterize in swift and expressive forms general and typical truths of tides and
brother
in jest: "I am going to Constable's, bring me my umbrella." It was
I the air
e usually revealed to us as fresh and virginal from their baptism of dew or
To such an elemental beauty the master adds a note of human interest, as
work before us. The noble old Cathedral with its exquisite spire is not only a
lovely surface, where light and shade, atmospheric tone and color " linger and wander
on," but with the close that frames the scene suggests those peaceful, tender, and sacred
seasons in the palpable atmosphere of that land of frequent showers. A
painter once sajd
Itself
a fine and true compliment, for in our master's pictures, earth, vegetation,
rain. 91
the
and
are
in
associations which will appeal to whomsoever knows and loves the painter's
country,
which he limns to the life. Nothing, no ideal visions even such as Turner knew, can
win our artist away from his own golden green vista, and the common things of rural
world about him. "I love every stile and stump and lane in the village," he says of
his native place; and the love was rewarded, for no artist before or since has painted
England better. We have not a monumental or symbolic art but an honest, manly,
and sincere imagery of external nature. Yet there is an element of both symbolism
and the monumental in Constable's work, for both these qualities are present to an
extent in all his finer pictures, whether of noble cathedrals, loaded wains returning
from the fields, or of his beloved and ever delightful Hampstead Heath. If we add
to this the complete mastery of his craft in color and in form and the breadth of style
which is still a living influence in landscape, both in Europe and America, we can under-
stand the fame Constable now enjoys. Like many of the newer " old masters" whose
work commands a high price, Constable's work is often forged, and the student should
be careful to see authentic examples. Any genuine piece is inexhaustibly delightful.
s even
