There is no more English a painter than John Constable (1776-1837). Nevertheless, it was France that made him. In 1824, Constable was 48 years old, married, a father of four (three more children were to follow) and still struggling for a reputation. Fully 18 years earlier he had declared that “there is no easy way of becoming a painter” and the truth of that statement remained painfully true to him.
A comparison with his contemporary JMW Turner, born just a year earlier, shows how effortful was his progress towards becoming an established and successful artist. Turner exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy at the age of 15 but it took Constable until his mid-twenties; Turner was elected to the RA at 26, Constable did not achieve the distinction until he was 52 , and even then he scraped in by just one vote; Turner while a teenager earned more than his barber father while Constable was still only dreaming of becoming an artist, being groomed instead to take over his father’s thriving grain and milling business; Turner’s patrons were numerous and widespread, Constable’s were confined to a tight circle of acquaintances – his most important works to date being bought by a close friend, John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury.
In 1824, however, there were signs that things were beginning to change. Fed up competing with showier works “which are extravagant in colour & bad taste wanting truth”, as he described them, Constable started to pour everything he had painstakingly learned about landscape painting into large canvases. When his picture of Flatford Mill was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, it gathered widespread praise even if it failed to attract a buyer. The White Horse (1819), the first of his “six-footers” (a size he adopted not only to help his landscapes stand out on the crowded walls of the RA Summer Exhibition but also to imbue them with the status usually accorded to the noble genre of history painting) led to his election as an associate of the Royal Academy. It was followed by five other similarly huge paintings.
It was only when two of these, The Hay Wain (1821) and View on the Stour near Dedham (1822), were shown at the 1824 Paris Salon, the most prestigious art exhibition in the world, that Constable’s achievement was finally recognised. He was part of a strong British contingent that year which included Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington, whose success led to the exhibition being nicknamed “the British Salon” – but it was Constable who stood out. His pictures left the leading artist of French romanticism, Théodore Géricault, “quite stunned”, while the younger Eugène Delacroix called him “one of England’s glories” and a man who “broke out of the rut of traditional landscape painting” and immediately adopted Constable’s colouring for his own pictures. Constable was awarded a gold medal by the French king, Charles X, and attempts were made to buy The Hay Wain, which had failed to sell in England, for the Louvre. Imagine the wailing today had the purchase succeeded.
What was it that the French had seen that Constable’s fellow countrymen had failed to notice or understand? They instantly recognised that Constable actually looked at the landscape rather than mimicking other artists – notably the golden arcadias of Claude Lorrain – as had usually (with the exception of Thomas Gainsborough) previously been the case. Constable’s pictures made French landscapes look both decorous and conformist, while his had fresh air blowing through them.
The Reverend Henry Scott Trimmer, the biographer of Turner, knew Constable too and noted that his “great aim was to give freshness and motion”. He recalled that: “I have seen him lying at the foot of a tree watching the motion of the leaves, and pointing out its beauty. He would also stand gazing at the bottom of a ditch, and declare he could see the finest subjects for painting.” When Constable broke with convention and looked hard at nature first hand he established a new one: the difference is that between looking at the outside world from inside, framed though a window, and striding through it oneself.
Despite his success in Paris, Constable felt that the French critics, though “very amusing and acute”, were also “very shallow and feeble”. While they admired “the truth”, “the colour” and “general vivacity” of his works, “they want the objects more formed and defined &c, and say they are like the rich preludes in musick, and the full harmonious warblings of the Aeolian lyre, which means ‘nothing’”. Constable took these cavils as praise: “What is poetry… but something like this?” The lack of finish his critics – French and British – singled out was part of his method for capturing the transience of breezes, clouds, sunlight and foliage.
It was this determination to reveal accurately both the appearance and the feeling of the natural world that had held him back. While he had always revered the “Great Masters” – and indeed the collector George Beaumont’s Claude, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, was his early inspiration – he believed as an article of faith that “Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originally must spring”. He once heard an eminent doctor describe every individual case of disease as “a new study” and thought the same should apply to his pictures. Each should be specific to itself since “what is right in one, would be often entirely wrong if transferred to another”.
In a letter written in 1802, he confessed to “running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand”. It was a mea culpa that also amounted to a manifesto. He confessed: “I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind – but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men… There is room enough for a natural painture [painter]. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.” A “natural painture” – a painter of nature and an artist whose sensibility in front of the landscape could be both transmitted to and felt on the canvas – was what he aspired to be. So, as he settled down to paint, he attempted to empty his mind and “to forget that I have ever seen a picture”.
What Constable could never forget were the lessons imbibed during his first 22 years before he went up to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools. As the son of a prosperous Suffolk miller and grain dealer whose business comprised 40 acres, two watermills and a windmill, a fleet of barges and a ship to transport grain to London, the seasons mattered. Constable, nicknamed “the handsome miller”, grew up with wind, sun and rain as material concerns. The rhythms of the countryside “shaped his neural pathways”, as Susan Owens writes in Constable’s Year, her perceptive and revealing new study of just how entwined was the painter’s life with the pulse of the seasons. “He would become the only landscape painter of his generation who knew how a windmill actually worked and could tell you the week of the year by the colour of ripening corn in a painting.”
This, of course, did not initially endear him to a public in thrall to the picturesque and sublime, watchwords for any Georgian art lover with pretensions to sensibility. Constable knew it too. Not for him the misty peaks and frisson of danger so beloved of Romantic artists; his subject matter was, he said, “to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up”: nevertheless, he persevered.
This doggedness was ingrained. In 1802, although impecunious, he rejected the offer of employment as drawing master at the Military Academy at Marlow (now Sandhurst) because he thought it would be deleterious to his art, and when in 1809 he fell in love with Maria Bricknell, the daughter of the solicitor to George IV and the Admiralty – and therefore several stations above him socially – it was the start of a courtship that was thwarted by her family for seven painful years. At one point her father barred him from visiting the family home, forcing him to lurk, half-hidden outside in the hope of a glimpse of her, and the couple frequently despaired of a future together. It was only when Constable received an inheritance on his own father’s death in 1816 that the pair finally married.
By then, Maria already knew that she had competition for Constable’s affections. In 1813, she wrote to him with a slight edge to her flirtatiousness: “I wonder which you have thought of most this summer, landscape or me (am I not a sad jealous creature?).” He had already put her on her guard: “Landscape is my mistress,” he told her without equivocation, while also confessing that his admiration for Claude was such that “if anything could come between our love it is him”.
Nevertheless, Constable was not promiscuous in his loves. Although, like many a connoisseur of landscape, he visited some of Britain’s craggier regions – the Peak District in 1801 and the Lake District in 1806 (where he met Wordsworth) – there was no emotional connection there for him. “I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling,” he wrote to the Reverend Fisher, and it was home turf that truly stirred his feelings. “I associate ‘my careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.”
He ventured into other parts of southern England too: Brighton (“Piccadilly by the seaside”), where he spent much of the period 1824-28 in the hope the sea air would ameliorate Maria’s worsening tuberculosis; London, where he passed a portion of each year painting, exhibiting and making connections; and visits to Weymouth and Wiltshire (where in 1835 he painted an extraordinary – indeed, bravura – watercolour of Stonehenge under a double rainbow: it was made, he said, to capture the mood of a place that “carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period”). None though gave him the same profound contentment as the attractive but unremarkable landscape of the Suffolk-Essex border.
This predilection has at times led him to be thought unadventurous. In fact it was a radical choice and a challenge. “The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, &c, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things,” he declared, and was motivated by the need to paint both the truth of these sensations and the soul-stirring he found in them. “Shakespeare could make everything poetical,” he said, “he tells us of poor Tom’s haunts among ‘sheep cotes and mills’,” and he wanted to do something similar.
In this he was countryman, artist and scientist too since he believed that paintings were “experiments” that “should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature”. This conviction is apparent in his letters, which are full of observations about the natural world, particularly skies. So the numerous small cloud studies (which he called “skying”) made en plein air on Hampstead Heath and elsewhere are part of his personal programme of inquiry as a natural philosopher. Even a scene of great atmospheric drama, such as his thrilling Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1827) – a scudding storm captured in a series of slashes in blacks and ochres – was made not for effect but to record a climatic event and learn from it. He had certainly studied the work of contemporaneous meteorologists such as Luke Howard and Thomas Forster: Henry Fuseli, painter of the psycho-sexual The Nightmare (1781) and professor of painting at the RA, said that standing in front of one of Constable’s paintings made him want to cover up (“Where is my great-coat? I am going to see Mr Constable’s pictures”) or reach for an umbrella.
However, Constable was far from immune to the emotive sentiments the sky or landscape could arouse. In his writings, objective detachment time and again gives way to a form of ecstasy as his scientific clear-sightedness (jotted notes on his sketches describing wind direction, types of cloud, visibility, time of day) becomes overwhelmed by the feelings the scenes he describes awakened in him. And nor was he able to keep his own emotions out of his paintings either.
Maria died in late 1828: “The face of the World is totally changed to me,” he confessed. The following year, in the mourning mood that would never fully lift, he painted the tumble-down remains of Hadleigh Castle. It is hard not to see the large, broken round tower in the painting as a form of self-portrait. It stands marooned, looking over the Thames estuary under a blustery and cloud-filled sky. There is a man with a dog and a cowherd in the scene but they are apart and isolated. Although his handling of paint is refined in the finished version, in the full-scale preparatory oil sketch that preceded it the paint is choppy, thick and rough – the buffeting wind is tangible. In much of his work, Constable made his emotional connection to nature subservient to the image, but here he was either unwilling or unable to: the painting is unequivocally an external depiction of his inner despair.
As with most of Constable’s major paintings, Hadleigh Castle was a recreation based on observation in which memory was as important as verisimilitude. The oil and pencil studies he habitually made in front of a given scene were transformed into finished works in the studio, often during a different season from the one in which they had initially been captured. So agricultural workers who may or may not have been present as he sketched found their place in the eventual works because they were compositionally necessary. Nevertheless, they were always true to type; his labourers are like those of his contemporary, the wood engraver Thomas Bewick, men and women who toil rather than disport themselves picturesquely. Landscape was for both artists a place of work. And when Constable painted The Hay Wain he found he didn’t have an image of a suitable cart among his own drawings so he asked the son of a Suffolk friend to draw “a scrave or harvest waggon” for him and send it down to London. In a lecture given at the Royal Institution in 1836 he proclaimed that “imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities”. A good painting, he believed, could not be psychologically true unless it was also objectively true.
This led to a widespread misunderstanding of his work. The critic Robert Hunt, for example, was not alone when in 1813 he found Constable wanting when compared with Turner: “He does not at all exalt the spectator’s mind, which Mr Turner eminently does, but he gives her an outward look, her complexion and physical countenance, with more exactness. He has none of the poetry of Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of her portraiture.” So Constable was probably more mortified than surprised when, as a member of the selection committee for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, one of his own works – Water-meadows near Salisbury (1820s) – was paraded in front of the assembled academicians (submissions were assigned a number rather than the artist’s name) only to be dismissed as “a nasty green thing”.
It meant, too, that Constable’s avant-gardism was perennially underappreciated. A picture such as his The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (1832), for example – a history painting depicting the opening of the crossing in 1817 – was criticised for the artist’s heavy use of the palette knife and for the white highlights that he flecked across the scene, which became disparagingly known as “Constable’s snow”. These, though, were innovative and deliberate techniques Constable used to unify a canvas some 7ft wide and to impart the true effect of sparkle and reflection in a scene largely comprising water and air.
Constable’s reaction was resignation rather than acquiescence to a more conventional aesthetic. He knew full well that he made art that “courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness” and contained neither “fal-de-lal” nor “fiddle-de-dee”. His defiance is one reason why there is “Constable country” while there is no “Turner country”.
[Further reading: How did British singers get so posh?]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to comment“.. the unremarkable landscape of the Suffolk-Essex border”??!!
What a patronising and narrow-minded lapse of judgement.