Constable, John, 1776–1837, English painter, b. Suffolk. Constable and Turner were the leading figures in English landscape painting of the 19th cent. Constable became famous for his landscapes of Suffolk, Hampstead, Salisbury, and Brighton. The son of a prosperous miller, he showed artistic talent while very young but did not devote himself to art until he was 23, when he went to London to study at the Royal Academy. Influenced by the 17th-century landscape painters Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain, his poetic approach to nature paralleled in spirit that of his contemporary, the poet Wordsworth. Constable's direct observations of nature and his free use of broken color were extraordinary in his day. He received but modest recognition in England, being tardily admitted to the Royal Academy in 1829. His work was more popular in France. In 1824, his View on the Stour (1819) and The Hay Wain (1821; National Gall., London) were exhibited at the Salon in Paris, winning gold medals. His work made a profound impression on the French romantics including the young Delacroix and Bonington. Later his painting influenced the Barbizon school and, more indirectly, the general course of French 19th-century landscape art. In the United States he is represented in the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection, New York City, in the Mellon Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., and in the galleries of Philadelphia, Toledo, and Chicago. Splendid examples of his work are contained in the National Gallery, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bibliography

See catalog of the latter collection by G. Reynolds (1960); C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (enl. ed. 1937); collections of his letters by P. Holmes (1931) and R. B. Beckett (1962); biography by B. Taylor (1973); studies by C. Peacock (rev. ed. 1972) and R. Gadney (1976).

Constable, John

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds, oil on canvas by John …

(credit: The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images)

(born June 11, 1776, East Bergholt, Suffolk, Eng.—died March 31, 1837, London) British painter. The artist's father was a wealthy man who owned mills at Flatford and Dedham, on the Suffolk and Essex banks of the Stour, respectively. Constable began his career in 1799 after entering the Royal Academy Schools in London. In the years 1809 to 1816 he established his mastery and evolved his individual manner, concentrating on the scenes that had delighted him as a boy: the village lanes, the fields and meadows running down to the Stour, barges drawn by tow horses, and the vessels passing the locks at Flatford or Dedham. In 1813–14 he filled two sketchbooks, which survive intact, with over 200 landscape drawings. After about 1816 Constable began to embody his concept of the Suffolk countryside in a series of canvases monumental enough to make an impression in exhibitions of the Royal Academy; his best-known work from this period is The Hay-Wain (1821). These works reveal Constable's detailed study of the formation of clouds, the colour of meadows and trees, and the effect of light glistening on leaves and water. Especially later in his career, he was considered a master of watercolour as well as oil painting on canvas. He is ranked with J.M.W. Turner as one of the greatest 19th-century British landscape painters.