Natural Landscape

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

It was in 1816 that he married Maria Bicknell, with whom he had been in love since 1811, and the correspondence between the two during these five years—several letters of which still exist—shows the simple nature of the writers and the complete trust each had in the other. The marriage was delayed owning to the long opposition of Constable’s father, and eventually it took place against his wishes, but there was no serious breach between father and son, and neither Constable senior nor Mr Bicknell, who was also very comfortably off, allowed the young couple to be in actual want. Two years before his marriage Constable had for the first time sold two landscapes to total strangers, but as yet he had no real success, and the young couple set up house modestly at 76 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square.

In 1819, when Constable was forty three, he exhibited at the Academy a large landscape, ‘View on the River Stour,’ which was keenly appreciated by his brother artists and resulted in his being elected as Associate, and in the following year his love of Nature led him to take a house at Hampstead.

When ‘The Hay Wain’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821 it attracted compartively little attention, but three years later it was sold to a French collector, who sent it to the Paris Salon of 1824, where it created a veritable sensation. Constable was awarded a gold medal, and his picture had an immediate and lasting effect on French art. His pure and brilliant color was a revelation and an inspiration to French painters, and under the glamor of ‘The Hay Wain’ Delacroix, the leader of the French Romanticists, obtained leave to retouch his ‘Massacre of Scio’ in the same exhibition. In a fortnight he repainted it throughout, using the strongest, purest, and most vivid colors he could find, and henceforward not only were Delacroix’s ideas of color and landscape revolutionized by Constable’s masterpiece, but a whole school of French landscape painters arose, as we shall see in a later chapter, whose art to a great extent based on the example and practice of Constable.

It was in France, then, that Constable had his first real success, and Frenchmen were the first in large numbers fully to appreciate his genius. It is a piece of great good luck that ‘The Hay Wain’ ever came back to England, but fortunately it was recovered by a British collector, George Young, and at his sale in 1866 it was purchased by the late Henry Vaughan, who in 1886 gave it to the National Gallery.

In 1825 Constable, now possessing a European reputation though still neglected in his own country, sent to the Academy his famous picture ‘The Leaping Horse’, which is generally considered to be his central masterwork, though many shrewd judges consider that the essence of his fresh, naturalistic art is still more brilliantly displayed in the big preparatory six foot sketch of the same subject, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was Constable’s habit to make these large preparatory sketches for pictures of special importance, and the great difference between the sketch and the picture is that the former was done in the open, directly from Nature, while the latter was worked up in the studio. Consequently the sketch always contains a freshness and vigor, something of which is lost in the picture, though this last sometimes has refinements of design, not to be found in the sketch.

Natural Landscape (continued)