Constable’s legacy is intertwined with that of William Turner, sometimes referred to as JMW Turner, as both spearheaded the prominence of British art around that time when previously art from this region had not produced a particularly high number of world-inspiring artists.

Those who are interested in British oil paintings often look beyond just John Constable to find other famous artists from this location. You can see a short list of the best other British artists below, whose art prints are also available to buy from our recommended art retailer:

• Sir Edwin Henry Landseer
• Joseph Mallord William Turner
• Alfred Sisley
• John William Waterhouse
• Joshua Reynolds
• Francis Bacon
• Thomas Gainsborough
• George Stubbs

Constable was, with Joseph Turner, the major English landscape painter of the 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside.

John Constable was born on 11 June 1776 in East Bergholt in Suffolk, the son of a prosperous miller. He was educated at Dedham Grammar School, then worked for his father’s business. He persuaded his father to send him to study at the Royal Academy Schools, which he entered in 1799.

In 1816, after much opposition from her father, Constable married Maria Bicknell. She suffered from tuberculosis, so they lived in Hampstead in north London, which was thought to be healthier than central London. In the early 1820s they began frequent visits to Brighton, also for Maria’s health.

Constable believed that his paintings should come as directly as possible from nature. He made hundreds of outdoor oil sketches, capturing the changing skies and effects of light. He was happiest painting locations he knew well, particularly in his native Suffolk. He also frequently painted in Salisbury, Brighton and Hampstead, making numerous studies of the clouds over the Heath.

Maria’s death in 1828 was devastating for Constable and left him responsible for their seven children. The following year he was belatedly elected to full membership of the Royal Academy. Constable received little other recognition in Britain in his lifetime, but was much better known in France. In 1824 ‘The Hay Wain’ won a gold medal at the Salon in Paris and Constable had a profound influence on French Romantic artists.

Constable died in London on 31 March 1837.

Constable, the son of a prosperous miller, was born in 1776 at East Bergholt, Suffolk, and it was in this area of the Stour Valley on the Suffolk – Essex border that he spent most of his life. He began his professional career as a student at the Royal Academy Schools and spent his early years absorbing the influence of Gainsborough’s landscape drawings, Claude’s classical compositions and Rubens’s stormy skies and rainbows, as well as the landscapes of the 17th century Dutch painters, above all, Jacob Ruisdael.

Following the fashion for painting mountainous, Romantic scenery, he spent some time in Derbyshire (1801) and the Lake District (1806), but it was only on his return to the quieter, less spectacular countryside of his native Suffolk that he developed his personal style. From 1810 there is an uninterrupted series of drawings and oil sketches painted in the open air and depicting his native countryside in what was an unusually fresh and direct manner.

After his marriage to Maria Bicknell in 1816 he moved to London, but continued to spend his summers painting from nature at East Bergholt. He was still virtually unknown, and in order to achieve a measure of public recognition, as well as to convey his feeling for the Suffolk Countryside, he decided to submit a series of large paintings to the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. The first of these ‘six foot canvases’ was ‘The White Horse’ (New York, Frick Collection) of 1819; the second, ‘Stratford Mill’ (National Gallery) was exhibited in the following year, and ‘The Haywain’ (National Gallery), the third, in 1821.

The Haywain

Originally exhibited under the title ‘Landscape: Noon’, the finished painting was referred to by Constable’s friend Archdeacon Fisher as ‘The Haywain’ as early as February 1821, and this soon became its popular name. A rustic scene of great calm, it shows a harvest wagon crossing a shallow stream near Flatford Mill; on the left is Willy Lott’s cottage, which belonged to Constable’s father and in the sight of which he himself had grown up.

It is fortunate that several preliminary studies for this composition have survived, for they enable us to obtain an insight into the artist’s method of work. To begin with, there are the sketches from nature made in his early years, upon which Constable drew throughout his career. For example, there is a small oil sketch of Willy Lott’s cottage in the Museum which has been dated about 1810-15. As was his practice with oil sketches of this period, he blocked in the main features in broad masses of strong, bright colours, giving the work a rough texture and a surprisingly modern appearance.

Years later, he made use of such early sketches when he was devising the composition of ‘The Hay-Wain’ – even the dog has been retained in the final version. At this stage he made the small oil sketch for the whole composition in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Constable now faced the problem of converting these small, broadly executed oil sketches into carefully composed ‘six foot canvases’.

It was at this point that he produced the large sketch, a full scale treatment of the subject but with the details only roughly indicated, the background merely blocked in and the predominant tone provided by the light brown canvas on which it is painted. By contrast, the full scale sketch of ‘The Leaping Horse’ is much more finished in both colour and detail. ‘The Haywain’ sketch really is an intermediary stage between the small sketch at Yale and the final version.

The finished picture in the National Gallery differs hardly at all in composition – only the figure on horseback in the foreground has disappeared – but it does show a more detailed treatment of the landscape, with firmer contours and more naturalistic colouring. It is by far the better known of the two, yet in some ways ‘it is the sketch, with its rapid brush strokes, its flecks of white and green skimming the surface, and its generally broader treatment that accords more with modern taste.

Constable’s Art

These two statements may, at first sight, appear contradictory, but it is important to appreciate that for Constable there was no conflict between a naturalistic and a poetic representation of landscape. The ‘Haywain’ sketch, like many of his other paintings, is dominated by dark threatening clouds.

Constable made a scientific study of cloud formations; he was determined to represent them accurately, and at the same time he saw that clouds could best express the mood of a landscape. ‘It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment’.

In the 18th century there had been a gulf between, on the one hand accurate topographical views, for example those of Paul Sandby, and Romantic or expressive landscape epitomised by J R Cozens. It was Constable’s achievement to combine these two tendencies: he portrayed his native Suffolk and one or two other areas in a manner both more naturalistic than that of any of his predecessors and yet imbued with a deeply Romantic spirit.

The blog aims to cover fully Constable’s best paintings as well as detail his life experiences and thoughts behind his work.

Salisbury Cathedral, John Constable

Constable DVD video clip taken from YouTube:

Constable Prints Sale

The Hay-Wain (With Willy Lott’s Cotta… John Constable View this John Constable Print The Haywain, 1819 John Constable View this John Constable Print Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows,… John Constable View this John Constable Print Judge’s Walk, Hampstead, circa 1820 John Constable View this John Constable Print The Cenotaph to Reynold’s… John Constable View this John Constable Print Willy Lott’s House, Near … John Constable View this John Constable Print Salisbury Cathedral John Constable View this John Constable Print Old Sarum John Constable View this John Constable Print Dedham Lock and Mill, 1820 John Constable View this John Constable Print View of the City of London from Sir R… John Constable View this John Constable Print The Cornfield, 1826 John Constable View this John Constable Print The Bridge of Harnham and Salisbury C… John Constable View this John Constable Print Full Scale Study for “The Hay Wain,” … John Constable View this John Constable Print Borrowdale, View Towards Glaramara, L… John Constable View this John Constable Print The Leaping Horse, circa 1825 John Constable View this John Constable Print Country Road with Trees and Figures John Constable View this John Constable Print Barges Passing a Lock on … John Constable View this John Constable Print Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead John Constable View this John Constable Print Brighton Beach with Colliers John Constable View this John Constable Print Stonehenge, 1835 John Constable View this John Constable Print Weymouth Bay with Jordan Hill, circa … John Constable View this John Constable Print Malvern Hall, Warwickshire, 1821 John Constable View this John Constable Print View on the Stour near Dedham John Constable View this John Constable Print Hove Beach, East Sussex John Constable View this John Constable Print

Constable article taken from ibiblio.org:

John Constable is an English painter ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists.

Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the fact of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Delacroix and Bonington among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency.

After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected what he called the `poetic diction’ of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always `running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand’. Constable thought that `No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world’, and in a then new way he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: `The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.’

He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry Fuseli was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable’s approach, for C. R. Leslie records him as saying: `I like de landscapes of Constable; he is always picturesque, of a fine color, and de lights always in de right places; but he makes me call for my great coat and umbrella.’

Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works–`six-footers’ as he called them–he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendancy to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. (The full-size sketch for The Hay Wain is in the V&A, London, which has the finest collection of Constable’s work.)

In England Constable had no real sucessor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel, 1825-87) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics such as Delacroix, on the painters of the Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists.