Last month I attended a talk at the Arc in Winchester to accompany their small but perfectly formed exhibition that focuses on the dark side of John Constable in his last ten years as a painter. The talk was given by Andrew Graham-Dixon, who began with a blistering attack on the "Mao-ists" of the English Reformation of the 1530s who decimated the traditions and heritage of English art, reducing centuries of religious art making to ground zero and re-setting the cultural clock.
By the 18th century, personal heroes like William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough had to build back the British art scene from a status far below that accorded to 'foreigners'. Hogarth created an entirely new Modern Moral subject in place of grandiose History paintings of battles, the Bible and mythology. In them, he ruthlessly castigated the wealthy and vain, exposing the cruelty and venality of 18th century London with the gravitas of a Greek tragedian.
Gainsborough and Reynolds, invested their portraiture with a magnificence that wouldn't be out of place at Versailles. Visit Kenwood House in Hampstead and you will see both Gainsborough's Mary, Countess Howe and Reynolds' Mrs Musters as Hebe, striding across Mount Olympus. Both women radiate with their portraitists' desire to elevate the genre beyond mere likenesses. Reynolds and Gainsborough throw the kitchen sink of artistic tricks; gesture, colour, lighting, allusions of greatness, at their sitters. Countess Howe places a dainty, exquisitely-shod foot forward, wearing the most Fashionable of gowns in the uber-on trend colour of Pompadour Pink. Back-lit like an 18th century cover girl, Gainsborough has borrowed all the devices of royal portraiture he learnt from studying Van Dyck.
Gainsborough's real love was landscape painting but the idea of painting the English countryside for its own merits were considered preposterous. Landscapes, if hung at all, came in the form of classical ruins in Italianate settings bathed in a Claudian golden light. That there could be anything worth committing to paint in the fields and woods of England was for the birds. By the time John Constable decided to become an artist, landscape painting still languished towards the bottom rank of respectable subjects. But Constable saw beauty and truth “under every hedge, and in every lane” and determined to “paint my own places best”. He stuck to his vision, never going out of his way to make himself popular or swaying towards landscapes of the imagination - the very idea would have made him shudder.
Constable has for too long suffered from being the painter of 'chocolate box' landscapes - the term was brought up by a member of the audience at the talk. He was a visionary, a radical, a deep thinker and a hopeless romantic. I have always held his achievements to be as significant, if not more so, than those of his great frenemy, Turner. Graham-Dixon is also of this view and gave an impassioned and powerful account of Constable’s significance, not only to British art but to contemporary and later French artists. When Delacroix saw The Haywain on its tour of Paris in 1824, he knew that a different artistic language was being 'spoken'. The Impressionists, with their loose, light touches of paint are direct descendants of Constable's remarkable records of retinol sensations.
HIs late period, in the 1830s, has been, until very recently, regarded as something of a blip in his insistently harmonious visions of rural England. These later paintings were regarded as, at times, impenetrable and criticised for their “spotty manner”. But for Constable there could be no light without shadow and he was always keenly aware of "the phenomena of Chiar'Oscuro" which he saw in all of nature. HIs aim was to translate the dynamism, the feel of nature into the texture of his paint. His splashy, squelchy, rippling brushwork is charged with the painter’s boyish delight in mud, rotting posts and rustling cornfields.
Nature for Constable was the “Mother of all that is valuable in poetry - painting or anything else”. The sky was “the chief organ of sentiment”. His unique and superlative cloud studies which can be found in many a regional art gallery sing with his wonder at their creation and fascination with their scientific composition. Graham Dixon sees them as little prayers - offerings by Constable to a higher power for cleaner air to help his ailing wife to breathe. Constable was as reverent in his regard for clouds as his contemporary nature worshippers such as Wordsworth, who wandered like one; Shelley, who wanted to be a cloud and Beethoven, who dedicated a symphony to them.
Constable was a man of science, but also a man of God. In one of his lectures as a Royal Academician, he urged students to paint a landscape as if it the Crucifixion had been removed from it. He painted landscapes that stood for something; the struggle from boy to manhood, the cycle of life with all its joys and sorrows, the garden of Eden and the Day of Judgment. “A knowledge and love of the works of our Creator leads us to Him” he said. Constable didn’t know the last ten years of his life were to be his ‘late’ period. He died suddenly, probably of a heart attack, aged 60 in 1837. At last a full member of the Royal Academy from 1829, he was a popular teacher and held a high regard for its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had done so much to improve the status of British art and its artists.
Graham Dixon finished by comparing Constable to that giant of American Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock. Too much? I don’t think so. ”Painting”, for Constable was “another word for feeling”. Pollock’s poured patterns of paint mirror those patterns found in the natural world. Pollock didn’t just imitate, but declared “I am nature”, finding equivalence for the movement of wind, water, sky and trees in the gestural action of creating his art.
Constable: The Dark Side runs at the Arc in Winchester until 16th August.
Image credits:
John Constable Rainstorm over the Sea c. 1824-1828 Royal Academy
Thomas Gainsborough - Mary, Countess Howe c. 1764 Kenwood House
John Constable Cloud Study, Hampstead, Tree at Right, 11 September 1821 Royal Academy
John Constable A River Scene, with a Farmhouse near the water's edge, 1830-36 V&A
Jackson Pollock One, Number 31, 1950 MOMA, New York