Skip to Main Content

 Admission is always freeOpen today: 10:00  to 5:00  Directions             Play Artle            

                  -  Visit                      - Visit
                    - Getting Here
                    - Accessibility
                    - Tours, Guides & Maps
                    - Food & Drink
                    - Gallery Shops
                    - Visitor Policies 
                  -  Collection                      - Collection
                    - Highlights
                    - Search the Collection
                    - Artists Search
                    - Acquisition Highlights
                    - Stories
                    - Games 
                  -  Exhibitions                      - Exhibitions
                    - Current
                    - Special Installations
                    - Upcoming
                    - On Tour
                    - Past 
                  -  Calendar                      - Calendar
                    - Films
                    - Performances
                    - Talks
                    - Guided Tours
                    - After Hours
                    - Fun for Kids
                    - Festivals
                    - Workshops 
                  -  Learn                      - Learn
                    - Teachers
                    - Families
                    - Teens
                    - Adults
                    - Learning Resources
                    - Music Programs
                    - Film Programs 
                  -  Conservation                      - Conservation
                    - Projects
                    - Publications
                    - Resources 
                  -  Research                      - Research
                    - The Center
                    - Publications
                    - Make an Appointment
                    - Archives
                    - Library
                    - NGA Online Editions 
                  -  Support                      - Support
                    - Donate Now
                    - National Membership
                    - Circle Membership
                    - Leadership Groups
                    - Planned Giving
                    - Major Giving
                    - Gifts of Art 
                  -  Shop                      - Shop
                    - Books
                    - Jewelry
                    - Apparel & Accessories
                    - Kids
                    - NGA Custom Prints 
                  -  Play Artle

Home>Exhibitions>Past>2006>Constable's Great Landscapes

# Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings

October 1, 2006 – January 2, 2007East Building, Mezzanine, Northwest, and Upper Level, Northwest

1942.9.9

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*Wivenhoe Park, Essex*, 1816, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.10

**Early Life and Work**

 

Constable grew up in East Bergholt, a village nestled in the Stour River valley of Suffolk County in the southeast of England. The rustic countryside was dominated by the meandering waterway, which had been made navigable for barge traffic in the eighteenth century. Though its gentle terrain lacked the sort of grand vistas and dramatic mountain scenery traditionally favored by landscape artists, Constable believed the Stour valley had set him on the path to his life's work, and he chose it as his primary subject for much of his career. The area became so associated with his painting that even during his lifetime it was called "Constable Country."

 

Constable's father was a prosperous merchant who expected him to take over the family milling business. Eventually he allowed his son, at the relatively late age of twenty-two, to enroll in the school of the Royal Academy in London, the leading British art society. Its annual exhibitions were crucial for establishing reputations, and Constable made his debut there in 1802. At first the young artist studied the landscapes of the old masters, but he soon decided that his painting would improve only by working directly from nature. During the summers, he returned home to Suffolk to create outdoor drawings and sketches that became the foundation for later studio paintings. As he explained to a friend, "Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originality must spring."

 

Constable developed his craft slowly, continually reexamining his technique in the wake of criticism that his "finish" (the level of detail and overall surface effect) suffered from coarseness of handling. He voiced his own desire to overcome a certain bleakness in his finished studio work. Attempting to capture the brilliant light of the outdoors, in 1814 he began painting canvases in the open air, with striking results. One example is *Wivenhoe Park, Essex*, 1816, an extraordinarily fresh view of a friend's estate. Using finely executed brushwork, Constable carefully arranged a wealth of details across the wide vista, punctuating it with areas of light and shade to convey the radiance of a summer day. Synthesizing so many elements into a harmonious composition proved a useful exercise for his later large canvases.

 

*Flatford Mill ("Scene on a navigable river"),* 1817, was also completed primarily outdoors. It was Constable's most ambitious painting to date — a large depiction of working life along the river and an important step toward the six-foot paintings. The subject was one he knew intimately from his childhood: the view faces toward the red brick buildings of his father's mill, just beyond the river on which two barges head upstream. They have just been unhooked from the tow horse in order to be poled under the bridge (indicated by the timbers in the lower left foreground). The fine execution of this intricately rendered canvas drew much praise when it was exhibited, encouraging Constable to move on to his even larger canvases.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*Flatford Mill ("Scene on a navigable river")*, 1817, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, bequeathed by Miss Isabel Constable as the Gift of Maria Louisa, Isabel and Lionel Bicknell Constable, 1888

This impressive painting, the forerunner of Constable's great six-foot Stour scenes and then the largest known work by him, depicts a view toward his father's mill at Flatford. Corn ground in the mill was shipped in barges down the Stour, which had been made navigable by dredging and the installation of locks. After being unloaded, the barges were filled with coal or other cargo and towed by horses upriver. Constable based the painting on a drawing and worked on it extensively outdoors at the site.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*The Hay Wain* (full-size sketch), c. 1820, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, bequeathed by Mr. Henry Vaughan

**Early Six-Foot Stour River Paintings**

 

In 1816 Constable married his longtime sweetheart Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the rector of East Bergholt. The couple settled in London, where the pressures of their growing family weighed heavily on the artist, who, at the age of forty, had yet to attain membership in the Royal Academy. His desire for greater professional recognition may have prompted his bold decision, in 1818, to begin working on monumental canvases intended to rival the landscapes of not only the old masters, but also his celebrated contemporary J.M.W. Turner. Over the next fourteen years Constable submitted the six-foot paintings regularly to exhibitions at the academy; size alone guaranteed these works would be noticed.

 

For the first six of these great landscapes, Constable chose the subject he knew best: daily life along the Stour River. In 1819 he exhibited *The White Horse,* an unassuming narrative of a tow horse being ferried from one bank of the river to another. Presented in heroic dimensions, this subject challenged the very conventions of landscape painting, which held that biblical, historical, or mythological themes set within idealized landscapes were alone capable of conveying significant moral or intellectual meaning and thus suited to grandeur of scale. The quiet rural scenes favored by Constable were thought appropriate for more modest canvases. Yet the sheer vitality of *The White Horse*, with its lush handling and fidelity to nature, earned Constable much critical acclaim. Soon thereafter he was voted an associate member of the academy.

 

While his smaller paintings could be developed easily from sketches painted from nature, Constable realized that the six-footers presented a new and complex set of technical challenges with regard to composition and level of finish, especially as he was unable to paint them outdoors directly before his subject. Rethinking the demands of his art, he undertook the remarkable step of creating full-scale sketches to try out his ideas. Although artists traditionally had used full-sized drawings on paper to help prepare their canvases, composing a preliminary full-scale sketch in oil on canvas for a large exhibition work was unprecedented. The sketches are powerful works in their own right and are widely admired today for their immediacy and vigorous brushwork. To Constable, however, they were considered to be simply the means to an end, and he kept them in his studio, never displaying or selling them. He in effect painted each composition twice — with all the commitment of time, effort, and expense (for materials) which that entailed — but he received critical attention and payment for only the finished work.

 

Constable seemed to tackle each full-scale sketch anew, never settling on a compositional formula. None of the sketches corresponds exactly with the resultant finished work; Constable added, removed, and rearranged elements in both sketches and final versions, continually rethinking and perfecting along the way. For example, the central foreground figures of the boy and horse in *The Hay Wain (full-size sketch)*, c. 1820, the preliminary sketch for the third of his six-footers, were originally also included in the celebrated final version from 1821. Constable subsequently painted them out, thus sharpening the focus on the wagon, the crux of the picture. The sketch’s quick, broad strokes plot out the scene; large passages of the dark brown ground were left untouched. In comparison, the finished version is fluidly painted, rich in both coloring and description.

 

Like the other Stour River scenes, *The Hay Wain*depicts a workaday subject set in a specific place (the house to the left belonged to a tenant farmer, Willy Lott). Yet the title under which Constable originally exhibited the work, *Landscape: Noon*, suggests a more generalized intent, removing it from the realm of topographical painting and placing it within the more esteemed tradition of representing the cycles and moods of nature. The painting, which has since become Constable’s most famous image, was shown in Paris in 1824. The expressive force of its execution, with its rich layering of pigment, had a profound effect on French artists such as Eugène Delacroix.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*The Hay Wain,* 1821, The National Gallery, London

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*The Lock,* 1824, Collection of Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

**Later Six-Foot Stour River Paintings**

 

Over time Constable built up his sketches more elaborately with impastoed pigment, often using a palette knife to define forms; at the same time, the handling of finished works started to approach more closely the dynamic freedom of sketches. To capture the sparkle of sunlight, he applied flecks of white and yellow to the surface of paintings, an idiosyncratic touch that puzzled observers and eventually came to be derided as resembling snow or soapsuds. Critics began to note this effect with *The Lock*, 1824, the only vertically oriented canvas in the Stour River series.

 

The painting was enthusiastically received and sold on the first day of exhibition but, as the artist wrote to his confidant and patron John Fisher in 1824, "My execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones — perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness is too much, but these things are the essence of landscape." The painting’s central protagonist, who presses down upon a crowbar to open the gate and release the water, introduces a jolt of action that distinguishes *The Lock*from the earlier, quieter Stour pictures.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*The Leaping Horse**,* 1825, Royal Academy of Arts, London

A similar energy is found in the last of the finished canal scenes, *The Leaping Horse*, 1825. Here a rider and horse jump over a cattle barrier on a towpath upstream from the Flatford mill. Perhaps the most commanding of the Stour River six-footers, *The Leaping Horse*is certainly the least topographically accurate, as Constable freely rearranged landscape features to arrive at a more satisfying composition. He continued to rework it well after the painting had been exhibited as a finished piece — a practice he carried out increasingly throughout his career. For example, he painted out a willow tree to the right of the horse and added a twisted stump to the very heart of the scene in a flurry of brushstrokes. Indeed, the drama of the painting comes in large part from its dynamic handling: many areas are worked out roughly with a palette knife, and dabs of white highlight are strewn across the canvas.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*Chain Pier, Brighton,* 1827, Tate Britain, purchased 1950

**Last Six-Foot Landscapes**

 

Starting in the mid-1820s, Constable began to diversify his subject matter, seeking to avoid being cast as simply a regional painter. He realized that his chances of being elected a full member (or academician) of the Royal Academy were greater if he demonstrated the full range of his talent. He marked his departure from Stour valley subjects with *Chain Pier, Brighton*, 1827, which he apparently completed without the benefit of a full-scale sketch (though smaller ones exist). Located on the southern coast of England, Brighton had in recent times grown from a small fishing village into a fashionable resort. Constable felt the town had been vulgarized by the influx of tourists and the rash of new hotels and services to accommodate them. Nevertheless, his family resided there between 1824 and 1828 so that his wife, who suffered from tuberculosis, could take advantage of the therapeutic sea air. The painting, which originally measured nearly seven feet long before Constable cut it down, offers a panoramic view of the town's new chain-suspension pier and the buildings of the developed waterfront. These are juxtaposed against reminders of the traditional community — a boat, fisherman, and anchor — that are prominently displayed in the foreground. What interested Constable most about Brighton were the breakers and sky. Accordingly, he depicted the popular resort under blustery, overcast conditions — hardly the typical image of a tourist attraction.

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*Hadleigh Castle,* 1829, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

In the fall of 1828, Maria Constable finally succumbed to her illness. Her devastated husband confided to a friend, "[A] void is made in my heart that can never be filled in this world. Constable's election to academician several months later did little to assuage his grief, for he felt despair at being unable to share his triumph with Maria. Nonetheless, he threw himself into work, sending *Hadleigh Castle,* a depiction of medieval ruins overlooking the mouth of the Thames River in southeast England, to the 1829 academy exhibition. Constable had visited the site in 1814, writing to Maria of its "melancholy grandeur." The painting itself projects a heightened sense of majesty, aligning the work more strongly with the conventions of historical landscape painting than any of his previous pictures — perhaps a conscious choice by an artist looking to prove his worth as an academician. The heavily overcast sky and the crumbling structures seem to hint at Constable's anguished state of mind, yet rays of sunshine break through the blanket of clouds as a vibrant light bathes parts of the countryside. The subtitle of the painting when exhibited was *morning, after a stormy night*, and Constable accompanied its entry in the exhibition catalogue with lines from "Summer" (1727) of James Thomson's poem *The Seasons*(1726 – 1730):

 

*The desert joys*

*Wildly, through all his melancholy bounds*

*Rude ruins glitter; and the briny deep,*

*Seen from some pointed promontory's top*

*Far to the blue horizon's utmost verge,*

*Restless, reflects a floating gleam.*

Constable's Great LandscapesThe Six-Foot Paintings
*Stoke-by-Nayland,* c. 1835–1837, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection, 1922.4453, Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

Toward the end of his life, Constable returned to the subject of the Stour valley in *Stoke-by-Nayland*, c. 1835–1837, which portrays the verdant countryside immediately surrounding a village near his native East Bergholt. He was attracted to old edifices such as Stoke's medieval church, writing that the tower "seems to impress on the surrounding country its own sacred dignity of character." Roughly executed with thick dabs of paint, *Stoke-by-Nayland*was long thought to be an exhibition canvas characteristic of Constable's rich, late style; however, the expressive handling, especially in the extraordinary sky, is much closer to that of known sketches than to known finished works. The painting is now acknowledged as a preparatory sketch for a six-footer that was never executed.

 

Constable died unexpectedly in 1837. Although he had struggled for recognition during much of his career, today he is counted among the most admired artists of the nineteenth century. His great landscapes, together with their exceptional full-scale sketches, remain his most enduring legacy.

**This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.**

**Overview:** 55 paintings and drawings by John Constable were shown in this exhibition, which focused on Constable's 6-foot-wide landscape paintings, including The Hay Wain, View on the Stour near Dedham, and Hadleigh Castle, and the associated full-size oil sketches. This was the first exhibition to display all of Constable's 6-foot paintings and the first to reunite them with the corresponding full-size oil sketches. The presentation was inspired by the recent cleaning by National Gallery conservators of the oil sketch for The White Horse, the first 6-foot painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.

A public symposium, An Expanding Vision: Constable and the Transformation of Landscape, was held on October 22. A concert of songs on landscape by William Walton and other English composers was presented on November 5. A Weekend in the English Countryside, a special family event of music and hands-on art activities, was held on November 4 and 5, supported in part by the Prince Charitable Trusts and the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.

**Organization:** The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Tate Britain, London, and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, California. Exhibition curators were Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, and Anne Lyles, curator of the Constable collection, Tate Britain.

**Sponsor:** The exhibition was made possible by General Dynamics and General Dynamics United Kingdom, Ltd. The exhibition was supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

**Attendance:**  88,686

**Catalog:***Constable: The Great Landscapes*, edited by Anne Lyles, with essays by Sarah Cove et al. London: Tate Publishing, in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2006.

**Brochure:***Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings*, by Margaret Doyle. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2006.

**Other Venues:**  Tate Britain, London, June 1–August 28, 2006The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, California, February 3–April 29, 2007

Constable and Turner: British Landscapes of the Early 1800s

                    - Constable, John
                    - British , 1776 - 1837

                  - Press Event:  Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings
                  -                                     Audio, Released:                                    September 26, 2006, (7:31 minutes)                                
                  - Press Event:  Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings
                  -                                     Audio, Released:                                    September 26, 2006, (49:28 minutes)                                

### Stay connected

Learn more about our exhibitions, news, programs, and special offers.

About
          - About the National Gallery
          - Stories
          - Press
          - FAQs
          - Contact Us

Plan a Visit
          - Getting Here
          - Accessibility
          - Today's Tours
          - Food & Drink
          - Calendar
          - Downloadable Map

Get Involved
          - Donate
          - Membership
          - Volunteer
          - Opportunities
          - Shop Online

Resources
          - Search the Collection
          - Conservation
          - Library
          - Archives
          - The Center
          - Film Programs
          - Music Programs
          - Audio/Video
          - Open Access Images

Hours: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily

**West Building**6th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter or exit from Constitution Avenue, 4th Street, or 7th Street. The Madison Drive entrance is currently closed.*

**East Building**4th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 4th Street.*

**Sculpture Garden**7th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 7th Street, Constitution Avenue, or Madison Drive.*

We are closed on December 25 and January 1.

*The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.*

          -  Twitter 
          -  Facebook 
          -  Instagram 
          -  Pinterest 
          -  YouTube 

© 2024 National Gallery of Art   Notices   Terms of Use   Privacy Policy