Age of Revolution
John Constable (1776–1837)
British Romanticism painter.
John Constable made the Stour valley and the Suffolk sky a new kind of English history painting — landscape as a known place, worked and weather. Born at East Bergholt in 1776, trained at the Royal Academy, he died in London in 1837. The Hay Wain, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, and The White Horse are the pictures by which that claim is still seen.
He painted oil sketches outdoors and large 'six-footers' in the studio, keeping the flicker of cloud and water. The Hay Wain (1821) is a farm wagon in the Stour; shown in Paris in 1824, it struck Delacroix and the French. Salisbury from the Meadows (1831) puts a rainbow over the cathedral after a storm. The White Horse (1819) is the first of the big Stour scenes.
Graham Reynolds's Yale catalogue of the later paintings and drawings is the standard modern corpus. Constable's intent, documented in letters and in the pictures, is to paint his own places as they were felt in changing weather.
The words the record keeps using: weathered, local, luminous, wet, English, faithful.
At a glance
- Lived 1776–1837
- Origin British
- Worked in London
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Romanticism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Atmospheric perspective, En plein air painting, Oil sketch (modello)
Works in the archive
- The White Horse, 1819 (The Frick Collection, New York)
A white tow-horse is ferried across the Stour — the first of Constable's large river pictures. The Frick canvas established the six-footer as his public form: a working landscape at the scale of history painting. - The Hay Wain, 1821 (National Gallery, London)
A hay wagon stands in the Stour before Willy Lott's cottage — a working river, not an ideal Campagna. Shown at the Academy in 1821 and in Paris in 1824, it became the picture through which French painters met… - Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831 (Tate, London)
Salisbury Cathedral rises beyond the Avon after a storm, a rainbow over the spire. Painted after the death of Constable's wife, it is the most charged of the late landscapes — weather as feeling without ceasing to be a…
What was said
Reynolds's Yale catalogue of the later paintings and drawings maps the six-footers and treats the Stour and Salisbury pictures as Constable's mature claim: known English places painted as weather and work.
The Hay Wain and the White Horse are read as pictures of places Constable knew from childhood — landscape as fidelity to a river and its work, not as an invented golden world.
The late skies and the Salisbury rainbow are cited as weather constructed from outdoor oil sketches: cloud as the event of the picture, laid in broken, wet light.
Lineage
Passed on to Eugène Delacroix
What would John make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after John Constable", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with John · Keep a life moment the way John would · Pictures made after John