John Constable: Britain's Local Landscape Master

At the Royal Academy, Constable spent most of his time studying and emulating the styles of the old masters. Among his favorites were Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci, and Jacob van Ruisdael, all of whom had a significant influence on his work. The influence of Claude Lorrain in particular was apparent throughout his career, evident in the freshness of light, color, and touch of his paintings.

Constable’s work almost entirely focuses on depicting the English countryside, and despite his moderate success later in his career, he never left the country. Cottages, small churches and lakes, and ordinary people at work in the countryside were his primary subjects, a distinctly English spin on Romantic-era paintings.

Constable only scraped by as a professional artist for most of his early career, generally commissioned for portraiture and country house painting. It wasn’t until 1819 that Constable sold his first major painting, The White Horse. The print without the frame was sold for 100 guineas to his friend John Fischer. This was a substantial sum of money at the time. The White Horse would mark the beginning of Constable’s success as an artist; it garnered enough attention for him to be elected as a member of the Royal Academy and it was also the first of a series of six enormous landscape paintings of the River Stour nicknamed the “six-footers” for their immense size. These paintings would be considered Constable’s masterpieces—Stratford Mill (1820), The Hay Wain (1821), View on the Stour near Dedham (1822), The Lock (1824), and The Leaping Horse (1825). The Hay Wain is widely considered to be Constable’s magnum opus and depicts a horse-drawn hay cart crossing a river in front of a small cottage, with the serene English countryside in the background.

His artistic success was overshadowed when his wife, Maria Bicknell, fell ill with tuberculosis in 1824. Constable and his family relocated to Brighton, hoping the salty air of the coast would help her with her affliction. While he was there he started to paint coastal scenes, but his only major piece from this period was Chain Pier, Brighton, exhibited in 1827. Maria died in January 1828, and her death took a serious toll on the artist’s life. The loss of Maris had a significant effect on the nature of Constable’s artwork, as his painting began to incorporate darker, more expressive tones compared to the serenity and calmness of his earlier work. Pieces like Hadleigh Castle (1829) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) are emblematic of this shift to a more somber mood.

 John Constable died in 1837 and was buried next to his wife at St. John Church in Hampstead. Constable’s artwork, although it did not garner him the financial success he deserved during his life, would grow to be considered some of the most valuable and popular of all British art. Across the channel, Constable’s work inspired the French Barbizon School, a Realist movement during the mid-nineteenth century that attempted to capture the innate serenity of the French countryside.