John Constable, Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’) 1816–7. Tate.
9 rooms in JMW Turner
Today John Constable is recognised alongside JMW Turner as a great British landscape painter. While his work was just as radical as Turner’s, it took him much longer to find fame
Constable’s paintings of rural life in the early 1800s have shaped how the English countryside is imagined and romanticised. Even at the time, his work was powerfully nostalgic. Britain was changing – cities were growing and industry was booming. Rural life was changing, too, and bad harvests plus falling wages created challenges not evident in the pictures you see here.
Constable loved his native Stour Valley, which lies between the counties of Suffolk and Essex in south-east England. At 23 he moved to London but returned home regularly to sketch. The Stour Valley ‘made me a painter’, he said. It inspired paintings that first got him noticed and so strong was his association with the area that even before his death in 1837 it was called ‘Constable country’, a name still used today.
Sketching outdoors in oils was the basis of Constable’s art. He sought ‘freshness’ in his work and to capture fleeting light effects. Unlike Turner, he didn’t travel abroad, although his paintings were hugely praised at exhibitions in Paris.
Frustrated by his lack of recognition in London, he started to paint larger canvases. These so-called ‘six footers’ show off his bold painting technique and knowledge of Old Master painters he admired, like Canaletto, Claude and Rubens. They depict landscapes beyond ‘Constable country’, too – London, Salisbury and Brighton – and show his ability to bring landscape to life.
John Constable, Hampstead Heath, with Harrow in the Distance c.1820–2
Constable wrote that living in Hampstead, then a small village north of London, allowed him to ‘unite a town & country life’. He rented a house there almost every summer from 1819 to 1826. From 1827 he rented a house there year-round, keeping a studio in central London. With its clean air, green heath and wide, expansive views, Hampstead delighted Constable. He made several outdoor oil sketches of this view. Harrow church can be seen on the extreme right. When this work was first exhibited in the 1880s it became the most popular painting for artists to make copies of.
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artworks in John Constable
John Constable, The Church Porch, East Bergholt exhibited 1810
Three figures sit and talk outside the church in East Bergholt, the village in Suffolk where Constable was born. A man, wearing a red cloak and tricorn hat, and a woman lean on the tombs while a younger girl sits opposite. These figures, old and young, and their placement in the graveyard may have been a deliberate way to build a deeper meaning into the scene, about the passage of time and our mortality. Though it is small, this was an important work for Constable – we think it was the first painting he submitted himself for exhibition at the Royal Academy.
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John Constable, A Lane near Flatford c.1810–11
Constable’s studio was full of oil sketches made outdoors like this one. Working quickly, Constable would have mixed together colours on the sketch itself – as seen in the white streaks in the lane. His aim was to capture fleeting effects like the movement of wind through trees. He may have liked this spot on a lane near his father’s mill because of the way the view opens up in two directions around the central mass of trees. He used the figure of the boy drinking from the stream in his painting The Cornfield, which is now in the National Gallery.
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John Constable, The Mill Stream. Verso: Night Scene with Bridge c.1810
Painted quickly outdoors on a bright day, this study is the setting for one of Constable’s most famous paintings, The Hay Wain (now in the National Gallery). It shows the view from the forecourt of Flatford Mill across a side stream of the River Stour in Suffolk. The stream had been diverted under the mill to power the waterwheel. The white house is Willy Lott’s House, named after the tenant farmer who lived there for over 80 years.
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John Constable, Stoke-by-Nayland c.1810–11
Using fewer and broader brushstrokes than in other of his sketches, Constable quickly captures the stark contrast between the bright sky and shaded copse. A figure in white carrying a bundle on her head stands out against the shadows. The scene is Stoke-by-Nayland, a village in Suffolk only a few miles from where Constable grew up. Even after he moved to London in 1799, he regularly returned to the Stour Valley to sketch outdoors and gather material for large exhibition paintings. The banks of the River Stour ‘made me a painter’, he later claimed.
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John Constable, The Sea near Brighton 1826
Brighton, on the south coast of England, was a place many Londoners escaped to. Some went there for fun, others for rest. Constable rented a house for his family there in the hope that the fresh sea air and change of scene would restore the health of his wife, Maria. This painting is one of only a handful of oil sketches Constable made outdoors in winter. He had written on being impressed by ‘the magnificence of the sea’ and of how seabirds, like those seen here, ‘add to the wildness and to the sentiment of melancholy’ at the shore.
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John Constable, A Windmill near Brighton 1824
Though he didn’t like the crowds that flocked to Brighton, Constable found its setting inspiring. Exploring the quiet of the downs behind the town, he discovered a working landscape of windmills, crops and grazing animals. Constable’s composition, with the windmill partially obscured by a mound, gives a good sense of this undulating landscape. It falls away on the right to offer a glimpse of the sea. This sketch was painted on 27 July 1824. He wrote a note about weather conditions on the back: ‘very fine morning after rain’.
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John Constable, Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ c.1828–9
When making his largest paintings, Constable tested his ideas on full-size sketches like this. Its subject originated in a palm-sized drawing he made on a visit to the ruins of Hadleigh Castle, Essex, in 1814. He developed the lonely ruin into a painting after his wife’s death in 1828. Expressing his grief, he wrote ‘the face of the World is totally changed to me’. The dark tones and heavily-worked surface of this painting signal a profound change in Constable’s life and work. From this point on, his technique became freer and more expressive, much to the alarm of the art critics.
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John Constable, Cloud Study 1822
In 1821 and 1822, Constable studied clouds and the sky intensively, mainly over Hampstead Heath, north of London. He often inscribed the date, time of day, wind direction and general weather conditions on the back of the painting, indicating an interest in meteorology. In this instance, the inscription on the back includes the time of day ’11 o’clock’ and ‘noon,’ suggesting Constable painted this in an hour. Capturing the changeability of clouds as they drifted above him was a challenging exercise. Constable’s lively brushwork, colour tones and understanding of the structure and movement of clouds made him adept at expressing mood in landscape painting.
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John Constable, A Cornfield ?1817
We think that Constable began this painting outdoors. He did so because he wanted to faithfully capture light, texture and atmosphere. He may have added details like the carefully-painted ears of corn above the bank on the left-hand side in his studio. Look carefully and you will see that the trees on right were once higher. Constable probably lowered them, increasing the space given to sky, when working up this sketch for a painting he exhibited in 1826, The Cornfield, which is now in the National Gallery.
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John Constable, Maria Constable with Two of her Children. Verso: Copy after Teniers c.1820
This rapidly painted sketch captures a tender family moment. Constable and his wife Maria had seven children. The two seen here sitting on her knee are probably the eldest, John Charles (born December 1817), and Maria Louisa (born July 1819). Constable and Maria had struggled to be together. Anxious that he made so little money from his paintings, Maria’s family only gave their blessing when Constable inherited money from his father. They married in 1816, seven years after falling in love. Tragically, Maria’s pregnancies weakened her fragile health and she died of tuberculosis in 1828, aged 41. Constable became a single father to their children.
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John Constable, Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’) 1816–7
Typical of the kind of painting for which Constable became famous, this is a snapshot of working life at his father’s business premises on the River Stour. It shows a barge being disconnected from a tow horse, ready to be ‘poled’ under Flatford bridge, in the lower left-hand corner. It is the largest painting Constable worked on outdoors. X-rays show us that he changed it significantly in the studio, painting out a horse on the towpath and replacing it with the two boys in the distance. Can you see where Constable has signed his name as if it has been written in the dirt track?
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John Constable, Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow 1836
Constable was proud of this painting. He called it ‘one of my best bits of Heath’, ‘so fresh – so bright... & sunshiney’. It depicts Branch Hill Pond on Hampstead Heath, north of London. The Hampstead Heath ponds were dug as reservoirs to meet the growing water demand of a rapidly expanding city. Sand was extracted for building works and the flooded pits became watering holes for animals, as seen here, and swimming. Constable’s late work often featured rainbows. He admired the way Old Master painter Rubens had painted them and saw in them a sign of hope.
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artworks in John Constable
John Constable, Brightwell Church and Village 1815
This view of the village of Brightwell near Ipswich shows the winding road that leads past houses and fields to the church above the trees on the horizon. Typically, Constable pays close attention to the light and colour of the landscape. White flowers and red poppies stand out against the fields and dusty bank in the foreground while pools of sunlight catch the golden fields in the distance. The Reverend FH Barnwell commissioned Constable to paint the view, as he had a special interest in the village.
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John Constable, The Glebe Farm c.1830
From around 1828, Constable’s paintings became darker. He conjured turbulent skies and applied paint using dabs and dashes. He grew obsessive about white highlights, believing they created ‘freshness’. The critics, however, called this effect ‘Constable’s ‘snow’. ‘Glebe’ means church-owned land. Constable’s supporter, the Bishop of Salisbury, had lived in this house during his time in Suffolk. Constable painted at least four other versions of this view after the Bishop’s death in 1825. He experimented on this one, adding a spire to the church and a rainbow on the right. He also tried changing the church into a windmill.
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John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’) exhibited 1832
This River Thames view is the largest painting Constable exhibited. He worked on it, and worried about it, on and off for 13 years. Constable wanted to show he could paint a grand cityscape, but it proved a challenging subject. He struggled with the composition, calling it a ‘blister’. A puzzling element is the group of industrial towers above the Lord Mayor’s barge on the right – these were not yet built when Waterloo Bridge opened. Whatever his reasons for including them, they signal the rapid industrialisation of the Thames’s south bank.
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John Constable, The Gleaners, Brighton 1824
With his back turned to Brighton, Constable captures a blustery sky above the downs that surround the town. Two women, the gleaners, gather wheat ready for milling in the windmills nearby. It was typical of Constable to be so interested in the everyday work that happened on the edges of the fashionable resort. As he often did, Constable wrote the time of day the sketch records on the back: ‘Brighton – Noon, looking N.E. Augst 20, 1824’. Later on, he extended the sketch to include the right-hand windmill and added clouds above the figures of the gleaners.
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John Constable, East Bergholt House c.1809
This was the house in which Constable was born. It no longer exists but is recorded in many drawings and paintings by the artist. In 1832 Constable published a volume of prints after his work, titled ‘English Landscape Scenery’. He chose an image of his house as the lead image (the frontispiece), and wrote beneath it: ‘This place was the origin of my Fame’.
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artworks in John Constable
Art in this room
John Constable
Hampstead Heath, with Harrow in the Distance
c.1820–2
John Constable
The Church Porch, East Bergholt
exhibited 1810
John Constable
A Lane near Flatford
c.1810–11
John Constable
The Mill Stream. Verso: Night Scene with Bridge
c.1810
John Constable
Stoke-by-Nayland
c.1810–11
John Constable
The Sea near Brighton
1826
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