John Constable – a realistic painter of England

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John Constable was a product of Eastern England with its luxurious meadows, distant horizons, picturesque villages and its everchanging sky with constantly moving cloud formations.

Deadham Vale

J. Constable, 1802

In Hampstead, he began a long series of sky studies. Many of these studies show the foliage of bushes and trees in motion and they are lit be gleams from a cloud-torn sky.

Cloud Study

Constable, 1822

Constable wanted to paint the truth and nothing but the truth. For this he used broken touches of colour. He often laid paints with his palette-knife. His deliberate roughness of texture broke with the tradition of smooth painting.

Rainstorm over the Sea

Constable, 1824-1828

Stonehendge

Constable, 1836

Sometimes Constable worked out his composition in a full-scale design, exactly the size of the version he was going to exhibit.

A well-known example is one made for “The Leaping Horse” (1825)

With the exhibition of “The Hay Wain” at the Royal Academy in 1821 Constable’s work became known to French artists. It is the most popular embodiment of Constable’s art.

Constable developed his own style of painting but fame was slow to arrive. He was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1829, but he felt that this honour had come too late in life to have much meaning.

The Royal Academy

Some more paintings by Constable

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds, 1823

The Cornfield, 1826

Weymouth Bay, 1816–17

“His nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human associations”

I. Parkinson