CONSTABLE

This lavishly illustrated monograph of the great British landscapist JohnConstable (1776-1837) presents a definitive survey of the painter's lifeand works. Jonathan Clarkson offers a comprehensive assessment ofConstable's oeuvre, from his earliest line drawings to his lastmasterpieces, including pencil drawings, quick outdoor oil sketches,painstakingly worked studio canvases, and less well-known portraits.Born the son of a miller, merchant, and gentleman farmer in the smallvillage of East Bergholt, Suffolk, it was not immediately obvious that JohnConstable would pursue a career in the art world. However, the youngConstable became a keen amateur landscape painted, inspired by the ruralsurroundings of his beloved Bergholdt home. With the encouragement of localwealthy connoisseur Sir George Beaumont, whose collection introduced theartist to such masters of landscape as Claude Lorrain, and an allowancefrom his father, Constable was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools,London, in 1799. There he studied the work of such masters as Lorrain,Gainsborough, and Ruisdael and developed his own style of meticulousobservation of natural detail combined with contemporary artistic theory.Upon leaving the Academy, Constable rejected a financially rewardingposition as a drawing master in favor of sketching and painting in theEnglish countryside for nearly ten years. He spent his time in pursuit ofan honest yet coherent and dignified 'natural' style, and pioneered therevolutionary practice of making finished paintings outdoors, direct fromnature. Commercial success came with Constable's decision to exhibit largeworks at the British Institution. These 'six-footers,' which secured hisposition among the greatest British painters of his age, included suchenduringly famous canvases as The Hay Wain.In this new monograph Clarkson looks at these grand paintings with a freshview, investigating what we can actually see in them. Set against therapidly changing way of life in nineteenth-century Britain, Constable'spaintings are both portraits of a disappearing world and reflections of hisbelief that 'painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiryinto the laws of nature.' Since his death, Constable has been condemned forpresenting a willfully inauthentic vision of the early nineteenth-centuryEnglish countryside, which was ravaged by unemployment, crime, and intensepoverty in the years following the Napoleonic wars. However, his importancefor Realism and for painting as a practice in itself cannot beunderestimated. Clarkson draws attention to Constable's direct influence onlandscape painters as well as figurative artists from his own time to thepresent, citing examples such as Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach.