Flatford Mill InfoBritain - Travel Through History In The UK : Flatford Mill Flatford Mill, Suffolk "But I should paint my own places best... I associate my careless boyhood to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter. That is I often thought of pictures of them before I ever touched a pencil." (From a display at Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill) The nineteenth century artist John Constable found most of his inspiration close to his childhood home in the Stour Valley in Suffolk. Living in East Bergholt, his father Golding Constable, a wealthy miller, often had business at nearby Flatford Mill. This lovely little area was to provide the scene for many of Constable's most famous paintings, and has been preserved as a memorial. Maintaining this area as it was in Constable's time is difficult. East Anglia has sunk about 20cm relative to the sea over the last two hundred years, and water levels are rising all the time. Nevertheless scenes depicted in famous paintings are still easily recognisable. Willy Lott's house. Most famously there is the ford outside farmer Willy Lott's house.

This is where the empty hay wagon makes its crossing in Constable's painting of 1821 The Haywain. Standing beside Willy Lott's house looking over the water brought home to me how important the idea of crossing over is in the painting. Constable was working during a crucial period of change in human history, as society crossed over from a rural to an urban industrial society. Constable's famous painting of the hay wagon, suggests that crossing over is a part of daily life. The empty hay wagon will soon be crossing back full of hay and life will go on as normal. And yet there is also a sense of the irrevocable nature of change. It is low tide in the painting, and wheel marks left by the wagon wheels will soon be washed away by the rising tide. The life represented by the wagon will similarly pass. A visit to Flatford Mill made me think of how the world changes and stays the same, which perhaps is the feeling that comes over most powerfully in The Haywain. The Haywain. This image is copyright free Constable was a romantic painter, and there is no doubt he idealised nature and rural life.

Nevertheless in the best of his paintings we see a realism to set alongside romance. There is no simple divide between the rural life Constable celebrated and the industrial society that was emerging. Crossing the bridge beside Bridge Cottage and turning left you will come to the lock depicted in Flatford Mill: scene on a navigable river. This 1817 painting shows a barge approaching the bank, a man on deck leaning hard on a pole as he guides the vessel in. Meanwhile in the foreground two young boys get ready to help pull the barge in. One boy is on the river bank, reaching down to the tow rope, while his companion sits on a horse, looking back. At first glace you would think they were playing. The shoeless boy on horse back rides without a saddle, and seemingly has jumped carelessly on the horse's back in a game. But looking more closely you realise these boys are at work. The man heaving on the pole isn't playing. He is relying on the boys to do their bit with the tow rope. The little boy on the horse looking back is waiting for the signal to start driving his horse forward. This is the realism that underlies the painting's romaticism.

As with The Haywain opposites are held together. There is an innocence and peace, along with hard work which starts early. Dry-dock at Flatford Mill It should also be remembered that the mill represented an early form of industrial production. Not very far away in Lavenham , where for a short time Constable went to school, water power supported industrial scale cloth production. Visiting Lavenham today it is easy to see the town as a beautiful, quaint throwback to a pre industrial era. In fact Lavenham was an industrial town, in the same way that Flatford Mill was an industrial concern. Beside the mill a dry dock where barges were built for Golding Constable still survives. Boat Building Near Flatford Mill of 1817 famously depicts the building of a barge here, and confirms this lovely place as an industrial site. A visit to Flatford Mill is a wonderful way into the paintings of Constable. A display in Bridge Cottage, owned by the National Trust, describes Constable's life and work. There is a tea room with great views over the river. Boat Building At Flatford Mill.

This image is copyright free The Fields Studies Council run art courses using Flatford Mill, Valley Farm and Willy Lott's house. These buildings are not open to general visitors. Opening Times: The area of Flatford Mill can be visited at any time during a walk along the Stour Valley. Bridge Cottage opening: Opening hours for National Trust properties can be complex. Please use contact details below. The property may close early during the winter if the weather is bad. Address: Flatford Mill, Flatford, East Bergholt, Suffolk CO7 6UL Directions: Come off the A12 onto the B1070 and then follow signs to Flatford. Flatford Mill is a good place to visit by train. Catch a train to Manningtree station, walk the short distance to the river, and then turn left onto the river path. Follow the path for about two miles, which will take you to Flatford. Click here for an interactive map centred on Flatford Mill. Access: Paths around the site are good and generally flat, although there is rather a steep incline on the bridge. There is level access to Bridge Cottage. There is not much room inside and the floors are uneven. There are adapted toilets in the information centre.

One motorised chair is available for visitor use. Contact: John Constable | The Hay Wain | NG1207 | National Gallery, London More paintings in this room Constable's painting is based on a site in Suffolk, near Flatford on the River Stour. The hay wain, a type of horse-drawn cart, stands in the water in the foreground . Across the meadow in the distance on the right, is a group of haymakers at work. The cottage shown on the left was rented by a farmer called Willy Lott and stands behind Flatford Mill. Today, the cottage and river path are still much as they were in Constable's time. Although the painting evokes a Suffolk scene, it was created in the artist's studio in London. Constable first made a number of open-air sketches of parts of the scene. He then made a full-size preparatory sketch in oil to establish the composition . The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821, the year it was painted, but failed to find a buyer. Yet when exhibited in France, with other paintings by Constable, the artist was awarded a Gold Medal by Charles X.

Share this painting The Haywain by John Constable The Haywain The Haywain by John Constable, is probably one of the most famous of all English paintings. Many a home has a print, but relatively few people know the story behind it. John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, England on 11th June 1776. Initially his father, Golding Constable wanted young John to join him is his prosperous corn business. By 1799 however it was obvious that John loved nothing more than drawing, so he was given an allowance to study at the Royal Academy in London. The art world was slow to recognize his talents. Landscapes were not considered very important in his day, so he had to produce a few portraits for his income. He would often spend his Summers in East Anglia, making sketches ready for them to be transformed into his beautiful works when he returned to his home in London. During these early years he created such works as Boatbuilding near Flatford Mill (1814-15) which can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1819 he moved to Hampstead Heath on the outskirts of London.

By this time his father had died, so he was more financially secure. He was now producing his best work, including The Haywain in 1821. The work was based on many sketches he had produced, many of which still survive. In 1824 The Haywain was exhibited in Paris, where it won a gold medal. The painting caused a stir amongst the French art critics, who were astonished by its freshness. In his later years he lectured, still trying to popularize landscape painting, but he died in 1837 with none of the fame he now has. The Scene Now In the Autumn of 1993 we went to East Bergholt in Suffolk to see for ourselves where this great work of art was set. The river bank is now overgrown, but it is easy to imagine the great artist seated with Willy Lott's Cottage on his left, Flatford Mill on his right and the wonderful Suffolk landscape before him. A large collection of John Constable's works can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum , but The Haywain itself is in the National Gallery in London, England.

The Hay-Wain by CONSTABLE, John Oil on canvas, 130 x 185 cm National Gallery, London John Constable's father was a wealthy Suffolk miller. Constable's truthfulness to nature and devotion to his native scene have passed into legend. Less widely known, however, is his biographer's report that it was seeing Claude's Hagar and the Angel (now in the National Galleery, London) and watercolours by Girtin which first provided him with 'pictures that he could rely on as guides to the study of nature'. Ruisdael, Rubens, Wilson and Annibale Carracci were among other 'reliable guides' whose work he copied as a young man. He also learned from contemporary painters, never forgetting the advice given him by Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy: 'Always remember, sir, that light and shadow never stand still...in your skies... always aim at brightness...even in the darkest effects...your darks should look like the darks of silver, not of lead or of slate.' Constable's youthful exclamation, 'There is room enough for a natural painture [i.e.

style of painting]', must be understood not as the outpouring of a 'natural painter' but as the proclamation of an aspiring student struggling for proficiency in the language of art, which shaped his deepest feelings before he could give expression to them. The Hay-Wain, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821 and at the British Institution in 1822 under the title Landscape: Noon, was one of the big 'six-footers' on which Constable worked in the winters in London from sketches and studies made in the country in summer. The harvest wagon of the modern title was copied from a drawing made by John Dunthorne, Constable's childhood friend and assistant, and sent at Constable's request from Suffolk. The view is of farmer Willy Lott's cottage on a mill stream of the River Stour near Flatford Mill, of which Constable's father had the tenancy. A full-scale sketch for the picture is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this final version Constable omitted a figure on horseback at the edge of the stream, substituting a barrel which he later painted out (but which is beginning to show through).

In thus 'selecting and combining' from 'some of the forms and evanescent effects of nature' Constable sought an 'unaffected truth of expression' without the loss of poetry. He laboured 'almost fainting by the way' to preserve the sparkle of sketches in these large paintings worked over for many months in the studio. The Hay-Wain, that best-loved icon of the English countryside, was admired by Constable's closest friends but did not meet with success at the London exhibitions. He sold it in 1823 with two other pictures to an Anglo-French dealer who exhibited them in the 1824 Salon in Paris. There at last Constable's achievement was understood. A cast of the gold medal awarded to Constable by King Charles X of France is incorporated in the picture's frame. John Constable - The complete works Contact Portrait John Constable John Constable (11 June 1776 - 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home - now known as "Constable Country"- which he invested with an intensity of affection.

"I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling". His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England. John Constable: English Landscape Artist in the form of poster art . Introduction One of the best English painters of the 19th century and a major contributor to English landscape painting , John Constable ranks - along with JMW Turner (1775-1851) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28) - as one of the three best landscape artists in Britain. Early Years and Training Born in June, 1776 at East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a prosperous mill-owner, Constable was from an early age responsive to the natural beauties of his birthplace.

"I associate my careless boyhood", he wrote later, "with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." He showed an early interest in painting and drawing , and was encouraged by John Dunthorne, a local plumber, glazier and amateur artist. He was also introduced to the famous patron and amateur painter Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827), and to the professional engraver JT Smith. THE ENGLISH SCHOOL For more famous artists from England, see: For a list of the highest prices paid for works of art by famous painters: Top 20 Most Expensive Paintings . After working for a time in his fathers mill, he went to London and in 1799, with the encouragement of the landscape painter Joseph Farington (1747-1821), he began training at the Royal Academy Schools.

Through Beaumont, Smith, and Farington, he became familiar with the European tradition of landscape painting , particularly the works of the French master Claude Lorrain (1600-82) and the Dutch painters of the 17th century, such as like Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691) and Jacob van Ruisdael (16281682). But Constable was already dedicated to depicting the countryside around his native Stour Valley in his own more direct and informal way. As early as 1802, the year he exhibited his first landscape at the London Royal Academy exhibition, he wrote to Dunthorne: "For these past two years I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand ... I shall make some laborious studies from nature ... There is room enough for a natural painter." Although he was to paint several portraits - sometimes with success when he was intimately concerned with the sitter, as is shown by the portrait of his fiancee Maria Bicknell (1816; Tate Gallery, London) - his main concern for the whole of his career was with the painting of the English landscape.

Development of Constable's Landscape Painting Constable's early development as an artist was slow; drawings made during sketching tours of the Peak District in 1801, and of the Lake District in 1806, show the diverse influences of Beaumont, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88), the Cozens, and Thomas Girtin (1775-1802). But he found that picturesque sights and mountain scenery did not greatly appeal to him, and he did not undertake such tours again. He wanted to depict nature directly and accurately, as is shown by the notes he made on drawings recording the time of day, the climatic conditions, and so on; but some of his paintings, such as Dedham Vale (1802; Victoria and Albert Museum, London), are composed in the formal manner of Claude, an artist Constable always admired. From about this time he began to explore more intensely the pictorial possibilities of the countryside around his Suffolk home, making small oil sketches in the open air and experimenting with brighter, more varied colours to convey the effects of light and atmosphere.

He also made small pencil drawings , notably those in the sketch-books of 1813 and 1814 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). With immediacy and brilliance, he recorded his observations, not only of details of foliage, of agricultural equipment, of men at work and at rest, but also of any scene that might be used later as the basis for a composition. These outdoor sketches in oil and pencil were intended as preparatory work for the highly finished oils he painted in his studio and exhibited annually at the Royal Academy. On one apparently unique occasion, however, when he was working on Boatbuilding near Flatford Mill (1815; Victoria and Albert Museum, London), Constable painted wholly in the plein air . In 1816, after a long and difficult courtship, Constable married Maria Bicknell, and by 1820 had settled in Hampstead, London. It was in 1819, the year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, that he revealed the full results of his studies and the extent of his talent in his painting of The White Horse (Frick Collection, New York).

This was the first in a series of six large oil paintings (approximately 4 by 6 ft) depicting everyday life and work on the River Stour. Like his earlier painting Flatford Mill on the Stour (1817; Tate Gallery, London) these works were intended to raise the status of his landscape painting at the Academy. The most famous of the series is The Hay Wain (1821) which was exhibited at the London Royal Academy as simply Landscape: Noon. This picture not only exemplifies the verdant, sunny qualities of the English countryside in summer, but also creates a quiet mood of utter contentment. Man is seen here as completely at one with his environment: an image that perfectly illustrates one aspect of the Romantic attitude towards the relationship between man and nature. For The Hay Wain, and for some other larger works, Constable made a full-size preliminary sketch in oils. This practice doubtless inspired the greater freedom of handling evident in his exhibited works of the 1820s, for example his use of the palette knife as well as the brush to apply paint, and his extensive use of touches of white colour to give a glittering surface texture.

By 1825, when he painted the last in the great series, The Leaping Horse (Royal Academy of Arts, London): he was undecided whether to send the finished oil to the Academy exhibition, or the preparatory sketch (1825; Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The two works were almost identical in their degree of finish and their loose, rapid brush strokes. There is always evident in Constable's mature works an impressive confidence in the beauties of nature itself; he once claimed that his "limited and abstract art is to be found under every hedge and in every lane." He wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821: "old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things ... as long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places." It is one indication of his originality that he expressed this view when the formality of the classical and picturesque styles of landscape painting was still universally expected and admired. Although Constable travelled very little in England, places outside Suffolk became familiar and important to him as subjects for painting during these years. There was Salisbury, which he first visited in 1811.

There he met John Fisher who was to be a life-long friend and whose uncle, the Bishop of Salisbury, commissioned the famous view of the Cathedral (1823; Victoria and Albert Museum, London). There was Brighton, where he first took his family in 1824 because of his wife's poor health, and where he painted some remarkably fresh and vivid beach scenes. The periods he spent at his home in Hampstead encouraged his interests in climatic change, particularly in the formation of clouds. Later Years Despite his belated election to full membership of the London Royal Academy in 1829, his later years were unhappy. In 1828 Maria died, leaving him with seven children, and his friend Fisher died four years later. Constable never fully recovered from these bereavements. His sporadic black moods seem to be expressed in the stormy atmosphere and restless brushwork of his paintings during these years, for example Hadleigh Castle (1829; Paul Mellon Center for British Art, New Haven) and the dramatic preparatory oil sketch for that picture (c.1829; The Tate Gallery, London).

Also around 1829, Constable began work on designs to be engraved in mezzotint by David Lucas and published as a series of fine art prints entitled English Landscape Scenery, a project presumably undertaken in emulation of Claude and Turner, and intended as a summary of the artist's ideas and achievements. Some of Constable's opinions on landscape were expressed in the accompanying text, and were expanded and extended in lectures he gave in Hampstead in 1833 and 1835. He died on 30 March 1837. In the 1830s, Constable achieved more expressiveness in his work; he aimed less at the careful naturalistic depiction of a scene and more at an immediate record of the light and atmosphere of the moment and their fleeting effect on the sky, foliage, and water. This expressiveness is seen at its most intense in the later outdoor sketches in watercolours , a medium he used more frequently in these years, and in the elaborate finished oils such as The Valley Farm (1835; Tate Gallery, London), the last great Suffolk picture.

The most turbulently Romantic of all the later works is perhaps the remarkable watercolour Stonehenge (1835; Victoria and Albert Museum, London), in which the mystery of the subject is enhanced by the disturbing presence of the double rainbow and the dramatically ominous sky. Reputation and Legacy The naturalism of Constable's art was recognized in his own day; Henry Fuseli remarked to Callcott in 1823 that Constable "makes me call for my greatcoat and umbrella". He achieved this naturalism largely by close observation, at times of a scientific intensity. He not only consulted scientific treatises, concerning meteorology for example, but also believed, as he stated in a lecture given in 1836, that his profession was "scientific as well as poetic". He was particularly interested in the effects of light and shadow, with which he attempted to suggest the transient qualities of the scene before him, to depict what he called the " chiaroscuro of nature". The advice he received from the President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West , in 1802, that "light and shadow never stand still" was described by Constable as the best lecture on chiaroscuro he had ever heard.

Constable's place in early-19th-century Romantic art is assured partly by this interest in the transience of nature, but mainly by his belief that "painting is with me but another word for feeling". For Constable, a landscape could express a poetic mood, as in The Cornfield (1826; National Gallery, London), which gives a visual interpretation of the lines from James Thomson's poem Summer which accompanied the picture when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1827: "A fresher gale begins to wave the woods and stir the streams, Sweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn." The boy drinking from the stream in the foreground of the picture also calls to mind certain passages from Wordsworth's The Prelude. Constable also possessed a grand, cosmic vision, different from that of Turner but no less intense. Both artists were able to convey their own feelings for the basic forces of nature, for the powerful vibrancy of the living landscape. Constable's achievement, like Turner's, was so original and individual that he had few followers among English artists; his closest imitator was Frederick William Watts (1800-62). However, his paintings were much copied and forged.

Although he never traveled abroad, his work was known in France; several works were exhibited and sold in Paris, notably The Hay Wain which won a Gold Medal at the 1824 Salon. Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), among others, especially admired Constable's work, calling him "one of the glories of England" and adopting to some extent his loose, broken handling of paint. Constable's principal influence in France was more far-reaching; his work was admired by the Barbizon group of landscape painters , whose consequent interest in naturalism and plein-air painting was to provide a suitable background for the Impressionists later in the century. His impact on other famous painters leaves no doubt as to Constable's position as one of the greatest landscape painters in the history of art . Along with William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough and JMW Turner, he was one of the first great English painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. Collections There are works by Constable in many of the best art museums around the world, notably the National Gallery , and the Tate Gallery , both in London.

The main collection of sketches in oils, watercolours, and pencil is at the Victoria and Albert Museum , London, mainly because of the bequest in 1888 by the artist's daughter Isabel.  For more biographies of great modern artists, see Famous Painters .  For more about English landscape painting, see: Homepage . John Constable | British artist | Britannica.com John Constable John Robert Cozens John Constable, (born June 11, 1776, East Bergholt, Suffolk , England —died March 31, 1837, London ), major figure in English landscape painting in the early 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, particularly those representing his native valley of the River Stour , an area that came to be known as “Constable country.” Self-portrait by John Constable, detail of a drawing in pencil and watercolour, c. 1804; in … Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London Beginnings The son of a wealthy miller and merchant who owned a substantial house and small farm, Constable was reared in a small Suffolk village.

The environs of his childhood and his understanding of its rural economy would later figure prominently in his work. As he would write in 1821, “I should paint my own places best…I associate my ‘careless boyhood’ to all that lies on the banks of the Stour.” Constable was meant to enter his father’s business, but, after meeting the famous connoisseur Sir George Beaumont in 1795, and then a circle of antiquarians and connoisseurs at Edmonton in 1796, he was inspired to pursue art . In February 1799 he made himself known to the influential academician Joseph Farington, and in March he entered the prestigious Royal Academy schools, with the grudging approval of his father. At the time, art academies stressed history painting as the most appropriate subject matter for their students, but from the beginning Constable showed a particular interest in landscape. In 1802 Constable refused the stability of a post as drawing master at a military academy so that he could instead dedicate himself to landscape painting and to studying nature directly in the English countryside. That same year he exhibited his work at the Royal Academy for the first time.

Despite some early explorations in oil, in the first part of this decade he preferred using watercolour and graphic media in his studies of nature. He produced fine studies in these media during a trip to the famously picturesque Lake District in autumn 1806, but his exhibitions of these works in both 1807 and 1808 were unsuccessful in attracting public notice. Early maturity Although based in London during this period, Constable would frequently make extended visits to his native East Bergholt to sketch . (On one such stay in 1809, he fell in love with Maria Bicknell, who was visiting her grandfather, the rector there.) Constable had been regularly sketching in oil since 1808, and by 1810 he had achieved extraordinary deftness with the medium (he would often be associated with his oil sketches in the future). His art became far more focused about this time: his sketches were either discrete studies, or, befitting academic practice, they were made in preparation for preconceived easel paintings.

The most significant large easel painting of the period was Dedham Vale: Morning (1811), which married closely observed naturalistic effect to a scene composed according to the academic criteria established by 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain . Britannica Stories Big Radio Burst from Tiny Galaxy In September 1811 Constable stayed in Salisbury with an old family friend, the Bishop of Salisbury, and grew close to the bishop’s nephew, John Fisher. Their correspondence is a hugely informative source on Constable’s art: he explains his aims and aspirations , reacts candidly and sometimes aggressively to contemporary criticism , and reveals himself to be driven, ambitious, and prey to gnawing self-doubt. During this period, Bicknell’s family was pressuring her to end her relationship with the struggling artist, and her courtship with him had to become effectively clandestine . Constable found relief from this distraction by working in East Bergholt and, by 1814, with Boatbuilding and The Stour Valley and Dedham Village, he was painting easel pictures in the open.

In his works from this period, such as Flatford Mill (1816), Constable displayed remarkable precision of touch and accuracy in description, comparable to contemporary landscapes by George Robert Lewis and John Linnell. His iconography was traditional and celebrated the continuum and stability of English country life. Constable achieved a bittersweet stability of his own when, upon his father’s death in 1816, he received an inheritance that allowed him the financial independence to marry Maria. Boatbuilding, oil on canvas by John Constable, 1814; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, … Courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London London Art & Architecture: Fact or Fiction? By 1817 Constable was an established Londoner, and, with the birth of his son John that December, he became a father. With a family to support, professional recognition became essential.

In order to achieve this, he began to paint on a large scale, and the 1.9-metre (6.2-foot) Stour scene The White Horse, which he showed at the 1819 Royal Academy exhibit, attracted public attention, generated critical approval, and helped bring about his election to become an Associate of the Royal Academy. The White Horse, oil on canvas by John Constable, 1818–19; in … Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Widener Collection, 1942.9.9 Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies By 1819 Maria was exhibiting the early stages of tuberculosis , and her failing health led the family to rent a house in the north London suburb of Hampstead, where she could find fresh air. Constable began painting on Hampstead Heath, before turning his focus to the skies. His cloud studies are unique, capturing the momentary qualities of changeable skies and accurately documenting meteorological phenomena with which he was familiar. In contrast to these small sketches were his large, detailed paintings made for exhibition.

He based these paintings on oil and pencil sketches, from which he would essay a composition onto a full-scale canvas before painting the final work. Constable laboured over these large works as befitted grand academic painting from the period. The White Horse initiated a series of large, well-received paintings that he exhibited, including Stratford Mill in 1819–20; The Hay-Wain, one of his best-known works, in 1821; View on the Stour near Dedham in 1822; The Lock in 1824; and The Leaping Horse in 1825. These all featured views of the Stour, but at a remove, as if filtered through memory. By 1824 Constable’s paint surfaces were becoming increasingly fractured, communicating optical effects that evoked the physical experience of nature; these qualities, in addition to his increasingly vibrant, luminous use of colour, have led many, erroneously, to see his work as a precursor to Impressionism .

He moved away from recording precise details of a certain locale partly because he was sketching at a variety of places during this period—briefly in Salisbury in 1823, and from 1824 in the fashionable seaside resort of Brighton , where the family repaired for the sake of Maria’s health and where Constable made a last great series of oil sketches. But his abstracted locales and omission of any agricultural representation can be read another way. An economic depression after the Napoleonic Wars had led to agrarian riots, and yet Constable, a loyal Tory, chose to portray an abstracted, well-ordered English society that was untouched by the industrial and social changes surrounding him. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Throughout the 1820s critics praised his work and Constable sold paintings. He achieved international success in 1824 when The Hay-Wain was shown at the Paris Salon, where he won a gold medal that was awarded by the king. Constable’s output also diversified: Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–27) pictured, among other things, urban modernity.

In 1828, Dedham Vale, reprising a scene first painted in his youth, secured him election to become a Royal Academician in 1829, a post that was much belated due in part to his famously difficult personality. This honour was soured, however, by the death of Maria, his great love and the mother of his seven children, in 1828. Final years Constable’s letters of the 1830s are suffused with an alienation and depression no doubt heightened by the critical attacks to which both he and his great contemporary J.M.W. Turner had been subjected in periodicals since the mid-1820s. Although they were never close and had radically different approaches to landscape painting, Constable and Turner both espoused the grounding in tradition of British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds; such ties to tradition were increasingly seen as obsolete by a new generation of artists and critics that was forming its values in a rapidly developing, industrialized society. Constable nonetheless stayed active. In 1829 he exhibited Hadleigh Castle, a stark image of ruin and desolation, at the Royal Academy.

He teamed up with the engraver David Lucas in 1829, producing mezzotints after his works that were published as a suite of prints entitled English Landscape. In his studies of nature during the period, Constable reverted from oil to watercolour and drawing, and he exhibited a fascinating range of work, such as Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). Constable created this painting, which quoted motifs from his renowned Hay-Wain, while agitation for parliamentary reform against the church made conservatives such as himself very anxious. This panic is perhaps embodied in the painting’s dramatic shifts in scale: the wagon appears enormous next to the houses, yet is dwarfed by the looming cathedral, which symbolically stands firm, enveloped in a rainbow, in the face of stormy skies. Salisbury Cathedral from Lower Marsh Close, oil on canvas by John … Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W.

Mellon Collection, 1937.1.108 Trending Topics Industrial Revolution In 1836 Constable submitted his last Royal Academy entry, Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Erected in the Grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, by the Late Sir George Beaumont. The work was a valediction to Reynolds, the father of British art, whose ties to tradition Constable revered; to George Beaumont, whose early influence inspired him; and to Somerset House, the site of exhibitions by the Royal Academy, England’s bastion of historic art, up until this final 1836 show. The painting served as an appropriate ode to the evaporating, traditional world in which Constable’s personal and artistic values had been formed. Assessment Constable was a significant painter during a period when landscape was a dominant genre in British art. His oeuvre was unique in that he usually did not elect to paint places popular with the touring public or other artists, but rather concentrated on sites with which he had family connections, or where, for personal reasons, he happened to be. And while other artists made oil sketches, none did so as extensively and intensively as Constable.

His landscapes represent a sometimes astonishing capacity to represent natural appearances—particularly, in his later years, the fleeting and dramatic effects of stormy skies—as well as a profound and prolonged meditation on the rural realities of a Britain undergoing a bewildering socioeconomic transformation. Study of Clouds over the Sea, Brighton, oil on canvas by John Constable, … In a private collection Constable achieved a reasonable reputation during his lifetime as a respected and significant landscape painter. After Constable’s death, Charles Robert Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843), based on Constable’s edited correspondence, extended his reputation, laying out the fictional life of a sincere and dedicated artist struggling against iniquity and incomprehension; it was Leslie’s loyalty to his friend that perhaps caused him to gloss over many of Constable’s less-appealing characteristics. By the early 20th century Constable’s oeuvre was reexamined when scholars’ need to find British antecedents to Impressionism led to an overemphasis on his oil sketches. In the late 20th century a reassessment grounded more in historical factors was attempted, an area of study that remains contentious .

While some have tried to relocate Constable’s landscapes within their contemporary context and have suggested that they are complex works of art with, often, a deeply political content, others have preferred to see them as embodying a quintessential “Englishness.” The fact that the argument is ongoing confirms the continuing vitality of these landscapes. John Constable - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) (1776-1837).Early in the 19th century, most English painters believed that "a good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown." John Constable, however, believed that nature should be shown in its own colors. He invented a technique to make this possible. Instead of using flat colors, he painted with thick daubs and flecks of many hues. He is said to have used "a thousand greens" to create the natural beauty of his trees and meadows. To suggest the highlights of sunshine, he used dashes of light-colored pigment known as "Constable’s snow." (See also painting.) Article Contributors

Question: Which famoust picture by Constable shows a wagon in the river near Flatford?
Answer: The Haywain