John Constable

John Constable was born on June 11, 1776, in East Bergholt, a village in Suffolk near the River Stour, which marks the boundary between Suffolk and Essex ^[1]. His father, Golding Constable, was a prosperous corn merchant who owned Flatford Mill and later Dedham Mill, along with barges that carried grain and coal along the river. The family occupied a substantial house in the village, and John grew up watching the daily traffic of the working waterway: lock gates, towpaths, barge horses, and the flat meadows that stretched toward Dedham church tower ^[2].

His schooling was unremarkable. He attended a boarding school in Lavenham briefly, then the grammar school in Dedham, walking there daily along the river valley he would later paint again and again. His father intended him for the family business, and for about a year the young Constable worked in the mills, learning the trade of a miller. Local people reportedly called him the handsome miller ^[1].

Two encounters pushed him toward art. He formed a friendship with John Dunthorne, a local plumber and glazier who painted landscapes in his spare time, and the pair sketched together in the fields around East Bergholt. More consequentially, in 1795 he met Sir George Beaumont, a collector and amateur painter whose mother lived in Dedham. Beaumont showed him a small Claude Lorrain, Hagar and the Angel, a picture Constable admired for the rest of his life ^[2]. In 1799, with his father's reluctant consent, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in London as a probationer, beginning formal training at the comparatively late age of twenty-two ^[3].

Anyone asking who was John Constable in the first decade of the nineteenth century would have found a slow-developing student rather than a rising star. At the Royal Academy Schools he drew from casts and the living model, copied old masters, and studied the landscapes of Claude, Ruisdael, and Gainsborough, the last a fellow Suffolk painter whose early work was rooted in the same countryside ^[2]. He exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy in 1802, the same year he declined a steady post as a drawing master at a military college, deciding that a salaried teaching job would end his hopes of becoming a serious painter ^[3].

In 1802 he also wrote to Dunthorne declaring his intention to become a natural painter, one who worked directly from the scenery in front of him rather than borrowing formulas from other pictures. That summer he began making small oil sketches outdoors in the Stour valley, a practice he continued for years. The sketches were rapid, made on paper or board, and were intended as records of light and weather rather than finished works ^[4].

Progress toward income and reputation was halting. He earned money through portraits, which he found tedious, and through occasional commissions such as an altarpiece for a Suffolk church. He turned down opportunities that would have taken him away from landscape, and his annual submissions to the Academy sold rarely. During these years he divided his time between London and East Bergholt, spending most summers sketching at home, and gradually accumulated the material, in drawings and oil studies, that would feed his mature work ^[1].

Constable's central achievement was a series of large exhibition canvases of the Stour valley, known as the six-footers, which he began in 1819 with The White Horse ^[3]. To prepare each one he made a full-scale oil sketch, an almost unprecedented step that let him work out composition and handling at final size before committing to the finished picture. The sequence continued with Stratford Mill (1820), The Hay Wain (1821), View on the Stour near Dedham (1822), The Lock (1824), and The Leaping Horse (1825) ^[4]. These pictures gave monumental treatment to canal traffic, farm labor, and mill machinery, subjects most contemporaries considered too humble for such scale.

The Hay Wain, showing a hay cart crossing the shallows near Flatford Mill with Willy Lott's cottage on the left, attracted little notice at the Royal Academy in 1821. Its fortunes changed abroad. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1824 alongside View on the Stour, it won a gold medal awarded by Charles X, and French artists studied its broken color and fresh handling of light. Eugène Delacroix is recorded as having admired Constable's work in this period, and the paintings were later cited as an influence on the Barbizon painters and, at a further remove, on the Impressionists ^[5]. The Hay Wain now hangs in the National Gallery in London, where it remains one of the most popular British paintings ^[6].

Among John Constable's achievements, his sky studies deserve separate mention. In 1821 and 1822, while living at Hampstead, he painted dozens of pure cloud studies in oil, often noting on the back the date, time of day, and wind direction. He called this campaign his skying, and he argued that the sky was the chief organ of sentiment in a landscape ^[4]. Recognition from his own institution came slowly: the Royal Academy elected him an Associate only in 1819, and full membership arrived in February 1829, when he was fifty-two, by a margin of a single vote ^[3].

In 1809 Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, whom he had known since she was a child visiting East Bergholt, where her grandfather was rector. Her family opposed the match. The rector, Dr. Durand Rhudde, regarded the Constables as social inferiors and threatened Maria's inheritance, while her father, a solicitor to the Admiralty, doubted the painter's prospects ^[1]. The couple maintained the attachment through seven years of obstruction and intermittent separation, corresponding when meetings were impossible.

The deaths of Constable's parents changed his circumstances. His mother died in 1815 and his father in 1816, leaving him a share of the family business that provided a modest independent income. John and Maria married in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, with his friend the Reverend John Fisher officiating ^[2]. They settled in London and had seven children. Because Maria's health was fragile, the family took houses in Hampstead from 1819 onward for the cleaner air, and later spent extended periods in Brighton for the same reason ^[3].

Maria died of tuberculosis in November 1828, months after the birth of their seventh child. Constable, then in his early fifties, was left to raise the children alone and wore mourning for the rest of his life. Friends recorded the depth of his grief, and the paintings that followed, notably Hadleigh Castle (1829), are often read as darker and more turbulent than his earlier river scenes ^[4].

The decade after Maria's death was productive despite its sorrow. In 1831 Constable exhibited Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a large canvas dominated by a storm sky and a rainbow arching toward the cathedral, painted in the aftermath of visits to his closest friend John Fisher, archdeacon of Berkshire, whose uncle was Bishop of Salisbury ^[4]. The picture's agitated handling divided critics, some of whom objected to the flecks of white paint he used to suggest sparkle on wet surfaces, a device mockingly called Constable's snow ^[2].

He also worked to secure his ideas in more durable form. Between 1830 and 1832 he collaborated with the engraver David Lucas on English Landscape Scenery, a series of mezzotints after his paintings and sketches, personally supervising the plates through many proof states. The project lost money but preserved his vision of chiaroscuro in nature, the play of light and shadow he considered the essence of landscape ^[4]. From 1833 he delivered public lectures on the history of landscape painting, at Hampstead, Worcester, and the Royal Institution, arguing that painting was a science of which pictures were the experiments ^[3].

Constable died suddenly on the night of March 31, 1837, at his house in Charlotte Street, London, apparently of heart failure, at the age of sixty ^[1]. He was buried beside Maria in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead. At his death much of his work remained unsold in his studio, and his family later gave a large group of paintings, sketches, and drawings to the nation through his daughter Isabel's bequest of 1888 ^[6].

Constable's reputation grew steadily after his death, helped by the biography his friend Charles Robert Leslie published in 1843, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, which wove together the painter's letters and remains a primary source for every subsequent John Constable biography ^[7]. In France his influence had already taken root: painters of the Barbizon school, including Théodore Rousseau, absorbed his example of direct engagement with ordinary countryside, and historians of Impressionism regularly cite him among the movement's British precursors ^[5].

The landscape he painted is now managed with his pictures in mind. Flatford Mill, Willy Lott's House, and the surrounding valley are cared for by the National Trust, and the area is promoted as Constable Country, drawing visitors who compare the scenery with the canvases ^[8]. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the largest collection of his work, built on the family gift of 1888, including the full-scale sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, while the National Gallery and Tate hold major finished paintings ^[6].

Basic John Constable facts still surprise people who know only the calm surface of The Hay Wain: he sold few large landscapes in England during his lifetime, never traveled abroad, and reached full Academy membership only at fifty-two. Yet his insistence on painting the scenes of his boyhood, his outdoor oil sketches, and his studies of shifting skies reshaped what landscape painting could be. Alongside J.M.W. Turner, his near contemporary and temperamental opposite, he defined the high point of British landscape art in the nineteenth century ^[2].