Here’s to – John Constable!

It is Sunday again and this afternoon is a good time to settle down with a ‘Gin and Dubonnet’ (reputedly the Queen’s favourite pre-dinner tipple) and join the curator, Aimee Ng, from The Frick Collection on ‘Cocktails with a Curator’ as she talks about John Constable’s ‘The White Horse’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4PE6BtgSk&list=PLNVeJpU2DHHR_0y_Zvgn3MgZQQFcFx2eI&index=2&t=0s

We are all familiar with Constable’s love of the English countryside and ‘The White Horse’, painted in 1819, was one of his favourite paintings and the first of his ‘six-footer’ artworks. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy the year it was painted and attracted considerable public attention and general critical approval which helped bring about Constable’s election as an Associate of the Royal Academy – something he had been seeking for a considerable time.

‘The White Horse’ also initiated a series of large paintings that included ‘Stratford Mill’ (1819-1820), ‘The Hay-Wain’ (1821) – probably his best-loved work, ‘View on the Stour near Dedham’ (1822), ‘The Lock’ (1824) and ‘The Leaping Horse’ (1825).  All the paintings featured views of the River Stour but at a remove, as if filtered through memory.

The painting in the Frick Collection is also the first painting that Constable made a significant preparatory work for – the ‘sketch’ is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. There is an excellent description of the ‘construction’ of the scene on the NGA website with further information in their downloadable pdf ‘British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries’: https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/british-paintings-16th-19th-centuries.pdf. Constable would continue to make detailed preparatory paintings for other works and the National Gallery of Victoria has a ‘sketch’ – ‘A boat passing a lock’ (c.1823-1826) – which is similar to ‘The Lock’ but almost certainly a study for the diploma picture which he presented to the Royal Academy collection in 1829.

In both the NGV and Royal Academy paintings we see a boat waiting to enter a lock before moving upstream. The boat has been ascending the River Stour and is now tied to a post while a man lowers the level so that the boat can enter the chamber to be lifted to the upper level of the river and continue on its journey. The lock is the lower gate of Flatford Lock and the view includes the tower of Dedham Church and the Flatford Old Bridge. The central figure, holding a large crowbar to work the lock mechanism, may the lock keeper or even the boatman. The landscape is dominated by threatening weather with rainclouds overhead which add to the drama of the event and the urgency for the lock keeper to ‘get on with his job’.

The pictures include many of the elements of Constable’s paintings: a humble everyday rural scene, an event on a river, mill dams, willows, rotten banks, slimy posts, brickwork, the play of light on the landscape, and the power of weather to animate. In a letter to Rev John Fisher, Constable says of this painting: “My picture is liked at the [Royal] Academy, indeed it forms a decided feature and its light can not be put out. Because it is the light of nature – the Mother of all that is valuable in poetry – painting or anything else … my execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones – perhaps the scarifies I make for ‘lightness’ and ‘brightness’ is too much but these things are the essence of Landscape”.

When Constable painted ‘The White Horse’ and the ‘Lock’ works, he had moved from Suffolk and was living in London with his young family and ailing wife. However, the Stour valley provided subjects for many of his pictures.  He spoke of how he associated his ‘careless boyhood to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter … I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil’ (From B. Beckett (ed.) John Constable’s Correspondence, vol. VI, 1968 – from the Royal Academy website).

As well as ‘A boat passing a lock’, the NGV has three other paintings by Constable in the collection. These include ‘West End Fields, Hampstead, noon’ (c. 1822) painted near his London home with a similarly atmospheric sky; one of his many sky studies ‘Clouds’ (1822); and ‘The Quarters behind Alresford Hall’ (1816). The last work has a very interesting and informative essay by Alison Inglis – ‘The heroine of all these scenes: John Constable and Rebow family in 1816’: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-heroine-of-all-these-scenes-john-constable-and-the-rebow-family-in-1816-2/.

There are also twenty-seven engravings of Constable works by David Lucas in the NGV Collection including a mezzotint of ‘The Lock’ from 1832. The orientation of this work, portrait rather than landscape, relates to the original ‘six-footer’ painting.

In 1827, Constable began work on a project that would occupy his attention until his death seven years later: the publication of a series of prints based on his paintings that would stand as a summary of his achievements. The painter collaborated closely with the engraver David Lucas to create prints that would convey Constable’s didactic intention—to illustrate the “chiaroscuro of nature.” The medium of mezzotint, in which the design is developed from dark to light using a wide range of velvety tones, was eminently suited to the project. There is an excellent description of this collaboration on the Tate’s website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-lucas-spring-t03986.

A final Constable to muse on as we sip the last of our drinks and prepare for another week ‘sheltering in place’ – cheers!