WASHINGTON — The Amtrak run from Manhattan to Washington is, for long stretches, surprisingly pastoral. Mostly what’s outside the window is low green land, flat water and high sky, not so different from the Nature that John Constable loved and painted in England two centuries ago. There are other sights too: industrial junk heaps, poisoned wetlands, used-up towns. These are things Constable didn’t see but feared would come to be.
Constable country: “Salisbury Cathedral From the Meadows” (1831). Works by John Constable on view in “Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings,” at the National Gallery of Art. More Photos »
Nature, love and fear are the substance of “Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings,” which opened on Sunday at the National Gallery of Art here. It’s a tremendous show, focusing on nine of the knottiest and most forceful landscapes produced in 19th-century Europe. That each painting is paired with the full-scale oil sketch that Constable made for it compounds the monumentality, and complicates it.
Nothing about Constable was simple. Contemporaries like J. M. W. Turner easily matched his scale. But where Turner’s late paintings are sheer, seductive cloaks of color draped over history and myth, Constable’s are walls of organic matter, as mulchy and dense as the earth they depict. You don’t stroll into them; you dig your way in.
Constable was a conflicted, self-tormenting man, a workaholic procrastinator, a striver racked with doubt. He was attractive but unclubbable, his genuine charm marred by petty mistrusts. He was reactionary in his politics. His closest intellectual soul mate was an Anglican cleric named John Fisher, a devout Tory who argued for the “naturalness” of slavery. Yet Constable’s art was innovative, even radical, in the way it turned plain paint and images of everyday life into vehicles for deep emotion.
In a sense his art and politics were shaped by one dominant emotion: an abiding, almost obsessive attachment to the world of his rural childhood, the only world in which he probably ever felt truly at ease. He spent a lifetime revisiting and reconstituting it in art.
Constable grew up in comfort in this world, the son of a wealthy mill owner in a Suffolk village on the River Stour. His family sent him to school to prepare for a church career; his association of nature and art with “moral feeling” may have originated then. When he told his parents he wanted to be an artist, they disapproved but ended up supporting him. He went to study, then returned to his village, East Bergholt, set up a studio near his family home, and painted in the surrounding fields and woods.
In 1816 he married a woman with local connections. Theirs was a love match, but also a social step up. The couple moved to London permanently. Constable’s driving goal was to be elected to membership in the Royal Academy, considered a necessary step to a sustaining career. To this end he had already been submitting paintings to the academy’s shows for years.
And for years he got nowhere. History painting, with its epic, edifying themes, was the prestige genre. And Constable’s smallish scenes of rural commerce, with their mills, barges and canals, were all but beneath notice. This changed, however, in 1819, when he submitted the first of his so-called six-foot paintings, “The White Horse.”
What was new was not the subject — workaday activity on the banks of the River Stour — but the aggrandizing, history-painting scale. At just over six feet long — none of the six-footers actually measure exactly that — it attracted instant notice and controversy. It was admired and disparaged, praised and denounced.
Just as newsworthy, though seen by few people, was the full-scale oil-on-canvas studio sketch that preceded the painting. It was, in effect, a giant painting on its own in which Constable roughed out his basic composition, adding, subtracting and moving things around before transferring the image to another canvas for exhibition.
The Washington show, organized with Tate Britain and the Huntington Library in California, unites all existing pairs of full-scale sketches and their matching paintings for the first time. They make a dynamic and stirring ensemble, not just for the insights into formal method they afford but for the aesthetic and personal narratives they imply.
The several gods of Constable’s historical pantheon — Rubens, Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael — are evident, in full force or as echoes. Nature is of course omnipresent, at once holy and homely, real and unworldly. And in a very modern way, paint has a life of its own, as it does in Rembrandt works. Thick or thin, brushed, swiped, smudged, dabbed, spattered, troweled: it is an organic force all but independent of depiction.
“The White Horse” set out those fundamental terms; the paintings that followed developed them. Gradually the work becomes less topographical and more metaphorical. Particularly in the sketches, Constable’s concept of naturalism changes: trees, once identified by species, become molecular swarms; skies turn into Himalayas of cloud. Compositions, initially diffuse, tighten and coalesce, definitively so in “The Lock” (1824).
Constable is famous for having placed small points of red in his pictures as subliminal focal points, although once you become aware of them, they can become distractingly insistent. “The Lock,” however, justifies their use. The bright scarlet of the boatman’s vest, just off center, snaps everything into place, and it strikes a dramatic note, like the on light of a security alarm.
What is the drama, exactly? It’s a sensation rather than an event, a moral feeling remembered from the past and preserved in art, an awareness of an energy, which Constable called Divine. It animates nature and human life alike, and transforms everything, from a shift of clouds to the boatman’s work, into a heroic act.
In other paintings the sense of drama can be more specific, even autobiographical, as in two pictures that don’t have the Stour Valley as a setting. “Hadleigh Castle” (1829) was painted soon after Constable’s wife died in 1828. Its image of a ruined tower above the sea is a Romantic cliché, rare for this artist. Maybe he needed a theme removed from his past to come to grips with her death, which had shattered him.
If this painting is a memorial to his marriage, “Salisbury Cathedral From the Meadows” (1831) is a monument to his friendship with Fisher, who was archdeacon of the cathedral, and who referred to Constable’s painting as an image of the “Church under a cloud.” Visually the description is accurate, but the real reference could have been political.
The Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed, reducing the power of the Anglican establishment. Other reforms to the old order were in the offing. Industrial mechanization was taking its toll on traditional farming, with Suffolk especially hard hit. Constable was feeling destabilized and depressed.
Maybe the Salisbury picture reflects this. The full-scale sketch is fiercely done, with paint knifed on, then incised with a stick or brush end. The play of light and shadow in the finished painting is melodrama, and nature seems to be reeling: trees tilt backward as if a cyclone had slammed through. The only true upright is the cathedral steeple, over which a great rainbow arches, descending to — or emerging from — John Fisher’s house.
Fisher’s death a year later dealt Constable a further blow. So did the passing of a Parliamentary reform bill, which, Constable wrote, put “the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people, and the hands of the devil’s agents on earth, the agitators.” The Royal Academy finally granted him full membership, but by then he was in his 50’s, and his reputation was far stronger in France than in England.
He kept working until his death in 1837, though his final six-footer, “Stoke-by-Nayland,” was left in the full-scale sketch stage. In it he returned to his origins. The sketch is an adaptation of a smaller sketch, also in the show, done around 1810, possibly outdoors, near his home village, toward the start of his career.
The scene shown couldn’t be more mundane: low fields, a couple chatting, a church against high sky. In the late version the paint is dark and clotted, like loamy, fecund earth; the forms indistinct, as if glimpsed at a great speed. “It is nature itself,” declared one 19th-century writer about a similar Constable picture, but “seen through a window.” And so it is: a sudden sight of overwhelming realness followed by a long, lingering backward look.