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John Constable
John Constable (June 11, 1776 - March 31, 1837) was an
English Romantic oil painting artist. Born in Suffolk, he is known
principally for his landscape oil paintings of Dedham Vale, the
area surrounding his home?now known as "Constable Country"?which he
invested with an intensity of affection. His most famous oil
paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821.
Although his oil paintings are now among the most popular and
valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and
did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected
to the Royal Academy at the age of 52.
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his
landscape oil painting in order to test the composition in advance
of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and
vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they
continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The
oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example,
convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's
finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any
other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in
retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who
demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally
new direction.
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed
numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined
to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric
conditions.To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable
used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled
over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light
enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic
and powerful of all his studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud,
painted in around 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing
dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at
sea.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time:
the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is
one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.
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