John Constable and the Beauty of Everyday England

Two and a half centuries after his birth, John Constable endures as one of Britain’s quietly radical artists, who bucked the trend for grandeur and led a quiet revolution to immortalize everyday scenes from the English countryside that’s today known as Constable Country.

John Constable wrote in 1832 that “my limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up”. And while other artists of his era, like JMW Turner, were painting historical scenes and dramatic myths, Constable was only interested in the hay wains, muddy paths, windmills, and weathered cottages from the countryside surrounding his Suffolk home in the south-east of England.

The son of a mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business, Constable instead persuaded his family to support him as an artist. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1800, eventually becoming an emblematic English artist whose The Hay Wain (1821) was voted the nation’s second favorite painting in a BBC Radio 4 poll behind Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

Celebrating the everyday details that made up rural life in the 19^th century, Constable’s decision to paint mill workers and bargemen going about their daily to day life was considered groundbreaking at the time, as he rejected more grandiose themes to focus on carts, locks, cottages, churches, horses, barges, and A Boat Passing a Lock (1826) that decorated the areas surrounding is home.

Drawn to “the sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten banks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things,” Constable’s paintings were the epitome of the quiet English countryside and transported viewers to the banks of water mills, stately homes, and locks on the banks of canals. “As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places.”

These places could be found all over England, as he toured the Peak District and the Lake District in the early 1800s, but as scenic as the hills further north were, he was more inspired by local scenes of Suffolk. And it was these scenes that helped to establish his name when he began work on a series of six-foot canvases in 1819, which included The Leaping Horse (1825) and The Hay Wain.

One of his six footers, The White Horse (1819) sold without the frame for the substantial sum of 100 guineas (equivalent to around $10,500 today) to his friend John Fisher, and its success saw him elected as an associate of the Royal Academy. And yet, despite his paintings now being regarded among the most popular and valuable in British art, he wasn’t a financially successful artist and only managed to scrape a meagre living from painting.

Not even The Hay Wain brought him any money, as it failed to find a buyer when shown at the 1821 Summer Exhibition. It did however receive a Gold Medal at the Paris Salon three years later, and it was in France where his art was most embraced.

Finding a market for his work across the Channel, French audiences were much more receptive than in his homeland, and Constable’s art even inspired French Romantics like Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, as well as the Barbizon School of artists promoting Realism in art, and the French Impressionists of the late 19th century.

At home though, Constable struggled in the shadow of Turner’s expressive and Impressionistic landscapes. Born only a year apart and both elected to the Royal Academy in London (Turner when he was 27 and Constable at the age of 53), they struck up a rivalry that came to a head on the eve of the Summer Exhibition in 1832 when Turner painted a daub of red in his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable, having seeing his painting hung next to his scarlet-flecked The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. The move devastated Constable. “He has been here and fired a gun,” he declared.

Chief Organ of Sentiment

Much like British painter Thomas Gainsborough, Constable was influenced by the Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael, while the works of Peter Paul Rubens proved to be useful coloristic and compositional models. Still, it was the vitality and grounded devotion to realism in Constable’s painting that set him apart from his peers, and of course, Turner.

Constable painted his scenes with a near scientific devotion. Contrary to popular artistic culture of the day that taught artists to incorporate imagination into their scenes, rather than how nature presented itself, Constable told his friend Charles Robert Leslie, “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture”

He embraced this approach when it came to the English landscape, even showing the same clinical approach to his representation of cloudy skies. And in England, he was afforded plenty of opportunity to paint the ever-changing skies. “The world is wide”, he wrote, “no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.”

Constable spent many days on Hampstead Heath, north London, painting nothing but clouds. Making meticulous notes of wind direction, time, and weather conditions, he was a meteorologist with oil paint. His cloud studies weren’t mere background decoration. They were central to his reason for painting, treating the sky as dynamic, ever-changing, and emotionally charged, stating that the sky is the “chief organ of sentiment” in a landscape.

His painting Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow (1836) was “one of my best bits of Heath,” according to Constable and is dominated by a tumultuous sky looming over the parkland. It also includes a rainbow, which was typical of his late work and was inspired by the Old Master painter Rubens.

Everyday Magic

It’s The Hay Wain that endures as Constable’s most celebrated and quintessentially English landscape painting, even if his truthful vision of the Suffolk landscape was considered quite radical by early 19th-century viewers. Today, it takes pride of place in London’s National Gallery.

Eschewing the industrialization that was rapidly altering the landscape in 19th century England and the more contemporary themes adopted by Turner, Constable’s art not only celebrates a place, but a time before mechanization and it has become totemic of an England that some feel needs to be protected.

Of course, it wasn’t all happy farming, beautiful days under a shady tree, and local scrumpy cider that flows like wine. Constable brought a refreshing honesty to his work, revealing the harsher realities of rural life, as those depicted laboring in the fields often struggled to afford the very bread they helped produce.

So deeply embedded in British culture are John Constable’s depictions of his native Suffolk that this stretch of countryside, just an hour from London on England’s south-east coast, is now widely known as Constable Country.

The rolling hills, mills, farmland, and ponds of Suffolk is where Constable spent much of his ‘careless boyhood’, and this romantic affection is reflected in his paintings of Dedham Vale, the area on the borderland of Suffolk and north Essex surrounding his home. “I should paint my own places best”, he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, “painting is but another word for feeling”.