Throughout his career, Constable strove to achieve excel-lence in an academic context. In the 19th century this meant success at the annual Royal Academy summer exhibition.
It is surprising to reflect that, despite now appearing to be the most conventional of English painters, Constable sold relatively few paintings during his lifetime and many of those that he did sell went to family and friends. In an attempt to secure his reputation for posterity, and to support his wife and
increasingly large family, he embarked upon a series of large exhibition canvases, the first of which, The White Horse, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819.50 These are com-monly known as the ‘six-footers’ because they are painted on canvases roughly six feet (183 cm) wide.51 They include some of Constable’s most famous works: Stratford Mill 1820, The Hay Wain 1821,52 and The Leaping Horse 1825.53 For each pic-ture Constable painted a full-size preparatory oil sketch in his studio on a six-foot wide canvas. The six-foot sketch for The Hay Wain (Fig. 8) was started in haste after a bout of family ill-ness in the winter of 1820, only a few months before a finished painting was due to be displayed at the summer exhibition. As a result, it is the least painted of all the full-size preliminary works. It was laid in with large brushes and a palette knife over a pale pink ground. The six-foot sketches are unique in western art, since no other painter is known to have created a highly worked oil sketch, identical in size to a finished painting, in quite this way.54 They were painted entirely in the studio based on drawings, outdoor oil sketches and small compositional oil studies. They were often worked on side-by-side with the final canvas while developing the composition. Bristle brushes and palette knives were used to lay in the composition directly, with little or no underdrawing. The surface was worked up wet-in-wet with rapid notational strokes, very high impasto, occasional scratching into the wet paint, even using finger marks. In these works, Constable had a complete disregard Fig. 8 John Constable, the ‘six-foot’ sketch for The Hay Wain 1821, oil on canvas, 137 × 188 cm (54 × 74 in.), Victoria and Albert Museum 987‒1900.
(Image © Constable Research Project with the permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.)
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for conventional finish, allowing drips, smears and cracks to develop (Fig. 9): he regarded these imperfections as of no con-sequence as they were private pictures, simply expressing the germination and development of an idea, and they were not shown to anyone other than relations and close friends during his lifetime. The six-foot sketches were so radical in appear-ance that when they were eventually sold after Constable’s death many were repainted by later hands to make them look less sketchy and more acceptable to 19th-century taste. Quite a few even became unrecognisable as Constables until they were cleaned and restored in the late 20th century.55
Many people are very familiar with Constable’s work, especially such popular images as The Hay Wain, one of Britain’s favourite pictures. Therefore, it is perhaps surprising that it was not sold when first exhibited in 1821. Despite its traditional appearance nowadays, at that time it was derided for its lack of conventional academic finish. In particular, crit-ics did not like the use of coloured specks and crisp, stark, lead white and pale lemon highlights that later became ridiculed as Constable’s ‘snow’. The crusty impasto in the landscape areas, applied over a highly textured stippled priming, was also considered too rough and sketchy for popular British taste. Having seen The Hay Wain at the Royal Academy in May 1821 one reviewer commented: ‘why the excess of pie-bald scambling [sic] in the finishing, as if a plasterer had been at work where the picture hung, and it had received the spir-its of his brush? … this is certainly an affectation and trickery of art unknown to our best painters’. Others derisorily noted
‘scattered and glittering lights’, ‘a mannered sparkle’ and that the surface was too ‘spotty’.56
By contrast, Constable’s works proved to be very popular in France and, in time, became highly influential. The French painter Théodore Géricault saw The Hay Wain at the Royal
Academy on a visit to London in 1821. He reported back to fellow artists in Paris that he was tout etourdi (totally stunned) by it. In 1824 Constable sold The Hay Wain and a number of other works to the French art dealer John Arrowsmith who took them to Paris and exhibited them in his gallery to much acclaim in June of that year. The young Eugène Delacroix was an eager visitor to Arrowsmith’s gallery and noted in his jour-nal the remarkable impression that Constable’s pictures had made on him. At that time, he was working on his own great masterpiece, The Massacre at Chios 1824.57 It is known that he went on to repaint passages of this work using Constable’s facture (manner). Arrowsmith exhibited his Constables at the Paris Salon of 1824, the French equivalent of the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The Hay Wain won a gold medal which was presented by the French king, Charles X.
It was admired by leading painters of the day and as a result Constable’s work became hugely influential both on these artists and later on a younger generation of paysagistes, the landscape painters of the Barbizon School such as Rousseau, Troyon, Huet and Diaz.58
Thirty-odd years after his death Constable was still casting his spell, as Monet and Pissarro are known to have commented on how impressive they found his works at the National Gallery when they visited London during the Franco-Prussian war. Therefore a direct thread can be traced from Constable’s The Hay Wain to Géricault, Delacroix, the Barbizon School, through Courbet and Manet to Impressionism and post-Impressionism then via Cézanne to Picasso. It can be argued in fact that Constable is a true father of modern painting.
In late 1828 Constable’s beloved wife Maria died after a long illness and early in 1829 he was elected to full member-ship of the Royal Academy. Together, these momentous events wrought a dramatic change on Constable’s mental state and Fig. 9 Detail of the bush in front of Willy Lott’s cottage, from Fig. 8. The white elderflower heads
were applied with a palette knife. Drips and cracks are all part of the richly textured surface. (Image © Constable Research Project with the permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.)
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his painting practice. Thereafter, as a Royal Academician, his paintings no longer needed the approbation of the Academy’s Hanging Committee, so to a degree he could relinquish any residual worries about convention and finish and concen-trate on painting what and how he liked. He appears to have taken out his grief on the canvas for the six-foot sketches for Hadleigh Castle 1828‒2959 and Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Meadows 1830‒31,60 which commemorate the deaths of his wife and of his best friend and confidant John Fisher respectively. In these works, he wielded a palette knife with great ferocity, applying emphatic sweeping strokes of thick impasto that would not look out of place on a late 20th-cen-tury canvas. In many of the late works, both sketches and exhibited pictures, he used large amounts of the brilliant lemon yellow pigment, Patent yellow (lead oxychloride). This has discoloured (as he knew it would) so that paintings that even now seem brightly coloured to us, with spirited flecks of pure pigment, would have been even more vibrant when first painted (see Fig. 10).61 We need to bear in mind that what we see now is nowhere near as startling as that seen (and often disliked) by the original audiences in the 1830s.
In the 1830s, Constable’s paint handling became more and more expressive and dynamic. It is significant that from this time on his exhibited pictures contain extraordinary pas-sages of abstract painting that are quite breathtaking for the early 19th century. He used brushes, a palette knife, and an impressed brush handle or stick to create lines and scratches and buttery impasto dragged and splodged. He applied wet over semi-dry, layer upon layer: more like the thickly woven surface of an embroidery than a painting. In his largest exhibited picture, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge 1832,62 he painted a balcony crowded with figures using nothing more than abstract dabs and flecks of pure colour: black, white and the primary colours, red, blue and yellow. From normal viewing distance these meld together to capture perfectly the crush of excited spectators, a true impression (Fig. 10). These
paint strokes are even more purely abstract than those in Boudin’s crowded beach scenes of the 1860s and the work of the French Impressionists almost half a century later.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the study of Constable’s painting technique is the way in which it vividly illuminates his personality, in particular his passionate involve-ment with the physical act of painting. As we have seen, he began his career with a good knowledge of materials and a sound basic training. However, his desperation to paint at moments of inspiration often led him to ignore these early les-sons and to use technically questionable practices, showing little concern for the long-term survival of his work. Technical examination has suggested that he intended his exhibited paintings, at least, to be lasting works. Nevertheless, in exam-ples such as The Centotaph, where he extended the prestigious exhibition canvas at the sides with tacked-on strips of pine pan-elling at the last minute,his good intentions were compromised or forgotten once the painting was under way.63
Constable expressed few opinions regarding the perma-nence of his paintings. In general, thanks to his initial training, his work has survived relatively well, especially by comparison with the works of Turner, Wilkie and other contemporaries.
Where paintings have deteriorated, the cause has usually been through the intervention of a later painter or restorer.
The sketches, particularly those on paper and millboard, were particularly susceptible to damage. In many cases, their thin, delicate ground and paint layers blistered and flaked off during early lining treatments. Paint losses were then crudely repainted and the pictures were varnished – often with a toned pigmented varnish – thereby destroying the original surface.
Fortunately, Constable’s paintings on canvas have suffered little by comparison. In a few cases, there is some evidence to suggest that soluble paint layers have been removed, prob-ably during 19th-century ‘restorations’. Today, the appearance of Constable’s paintings may be most radically affected by crude restoration and discoloured varnish; however, sensitive Fig. 10 Detail from The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’) 1832, oil on
canvas, Tate T04904. The yellow ochre-coloured paint is made with Patent yellow that has discoloured:
it should be bright lemon yellow. (Image © Constable Research Project with the permission of Tate.)
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modern professional conservation can bring them as close as possible to the way in which Constable wanted his pictures to look. It is important to remember that he expected his paint-ings to change with time and he painted, to a certain extent, with this in mind: ‘It is much to my advantage that several of my pictures should be seen together, as it displays to advan-tage their varieties of conception and also of execution, and what they gain by the mellowing hand of time, which should never be forced or anticipated. Thus my pictures when first coming forth have a comparative harshness which at the time acts to my disadvantage.’64 We may now be seeing Constable’s landscapes in the best possible circumstances.