John Constable’s old fashioned, radical vision
His giant paintings were both picturesque and ahead of their time
The 1821 four-by-six-foot oil painting on canvas ‘The Hay Wain’ is one of the English artist John Constable’s works that greatly influenced the French Romantic and later impressionist movements, and helped, with J. W. M. Turner’s works, usher in landscapes as a worthy subject matter.
Constable and his art are dichotomous in our minds. He was conservative, loved the old-fashioned rural life and his landscapes of everyday rural life seem lovely and picturesque to modern eyes. Yet Constable was a strong-willed visionary with controversial ideas about art. His unconventional subject matter and radical techniques were distasteful to the stodgy British Royal Academy. He had a great influence on other experimental artists and movements, including Romanticism, impressionism, and even the years later abstract movements.
In Britain at the time that Constable came onto the scene, landscapes were considered a low-level genre of art or was used merely as a backdrop for sentimental mythical and biblical scenes. Landscapes often consisted of maudlin, artificially perfect, and unnaturally balanced images of mountains or exotic faraway places. These works were composed entirely in the studio from the artist’s imagination and resemble fairy tales.
Constable strongly rejected this. He felt that natural landscapes, and local scenes depicting local daily life, were important subjects. Though he made the final works in his London studio, he made preliminary sketches in the field and strived for accuracy. He painted his landscapes as giant ‘six-footers,’ giving them the grand importance of historical paintings. Their large size itself was a statement.
Further, he aspired to paint things as he saw them. He was a champion of science and scientific accuracy in his works. He was the first artist to study meteorology, particularly cloud formations, and made endless studies of clouds. His preliminary sketches included notes on the weather, including sun and wind direction, and he loved that nature and weather changed.
He loved that no two leaves or snowflakes were alike and that a scene looked different hour to hour and season to season. He considered his paintings ephemeral snapshots. He found beauty in nature as it was, not as imagined in the artist’s head. His paintings included the mud, fungus, and rotting posts that he was familiar with from his rural childhood.
He introduced painting techniques to give his works realism which were controversial with the British Royal Academy. To make things appear as the eyes see them, he used broad brushstrokes and impasto, and mixed colors to depict movement. To the Royal Academy, brushstrokes were supposed to be invisible and his style made the paintings appear unfinished.
Another radical thing he did was to use natural colors. The British Royal Academy at the time wanted landscapes to be painted in ‘coffee colors’ to mimic the Old Dutch Masters. This is humorous because the brown tones of the old paintings were due to the toning and dirtying of the varnish over the years and the original colors were likely much more bright and colorful.
Constable did the radical thing of painting the grass green and the sky blue. He once put a fiddle on the ground to demonstrate to critics that grass was green not brown.
Along with scientific accuracy and depicting nature as it appears, Constable also wanted to express his emotions and beliefs, particularly his love of nature. He felt that the towering realistic skies and clouds expressed emotions and, to modern viewers, the skies give his paintings emotional and dramatic weight. The paintings are accurate but also full of emotion. Though his studio was in London, his heart was with the farm and rural landscape of his boyhood. In the age of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, he disliked manufactured parks and longed for the rural.
His interesting coupling of scientific accuracy and the emotional attachment and love of nature is shown in his competing quotes:
“Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”
“Painting is another word for feeling.”
Other quotes show his love of the beauty of nature and disdain for manufactured versions in cities and art.
“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”
“A gentleman’s park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.”
“The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion.“
The Hay Wain was dismissed by the British Royal Academy and went unsold in Britain. However, early French Romantic artist Theodore Gericault saw and championed his works. At an 1824 Paris exhibition, the Hay Wain was awarded a Gold Medal by King Charles X. France had many new Romantic painters with new rebellious ideas who saw Constable’s landscapes as a breath of fresh air. The French writer Stendhal gushed that his works were “the mirror of nature” and Eugene Delacroix was particularly enamored with Constable’s works.