John Constable

John Constable: Self-Portrait , 1806

John Constable RA (born June 11, 1776 in East Bergholt , Suffolk , † March 31, 1837 in London- Hampstead) was a representative of romantic painting ( landscape painting ) in England. His work lives from the tension between closer observation of nature (e.g. sky and cloud studies) and the neglect of the line in favor of the color effect. In addition to many landscapes, he also painted portraits , horses and still lifes .

life and work

Early years

John Constable was born the fourth of six children to Golding Constable and his wife Ann Constable in East Bergholt, Suffolk. His siblings were Ann (1768-1854), Martha (1769-1845), Golding (1774-1838), Mary (1781-1865) and Abram (1783-1862).

In 1783 he attended school in Fordstreet, Essex , then a school in Lavenham, from which he was removed because of a brutal assistant teacher. Instead, he attended Dedham Grammar School . From 1792 he first worked in his father's company, which traded in grain, coal and other things. Two years later he went to Norfolk with one of his father's employees to draw. On 29 January 1799, he met with the Cobbold's in Ipswich on Priscilla Wakefield , who gave him a letter to make a Joseph Farington RA. In the same year he received his parents' consent to study art in London and entered the Royal Academy in London as a test subject on March 4, 1799 , where he took the classes in still life and anatomy and also studied the old masters to which he was assigned learned to copy. During his studies he was inspired by the paintings of the artists Thomas Gainsborough , Claude Lorrain , Peter Paul Rubens , Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael . In May 1802 several drawings were made by Windsor Castle and Constable turned down a post as a drawing teacher at the Marlow Military Academy, a move that would have marked the end of Constable's artistic career , according to Benjamin West , President of the Royal Academy. In 1803 he had his first exhibition at the Royal Academy. In the same year Constable bought a studio in East Bergholt.

In 1806, two of the daughters of the Cobbold family made sketches, the first of a series of over a hundred sketches, drawn in pencil, Indian ink and watercolor, of mostly young attractive women in a home environment, reading, talking, strolling, dancing or posing in a graceful posture, individually or in small groups.

Marriage and first exhibition

John Constable: Portrait of Maria Bicknell , 1816

In 1809 he fell in love with the civil servant's daughter Maria Bicknell, who was twelve years his junior. In March 1815, his mother Ann Constable died. A year later, on May 19, 1816, his father, Golding Constable, died. On October 2, 1816, he married Maria Bicknell in the London Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields ; their honeymoon was in Osmington, Dorset . In 1817 he moved into a house at 1 Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. Their first child, John Charles, was born on December 4 of the same year, and was later followed by six more. In May 1819 Constable exhibited The White Horse , one of his large paintings, completed in the same year, at the Royal Academy and was made an associate member of the Royal Academy on November 1st . In 1824 Constable received a gold medal from the French king. The exhibition of two of his works in the Salon in Paris had a decisive influence on the French landscape painters ( Barbizon School ).

Last years

After the birth of the seventh child Lionel Bicknell in January 1828, Maria fell ill and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in November at the age of 41 . From this point on Constable dressed in black with deep sorrow and looked after his seven children until the end of his life. In February 1829 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

John Constable died unexpectedly on the night of March 31, 1837. He was buried in Hampstead .

Works

image	title	year	Size / material	Owner / collection
	Flowers in a glass vase Flowers in a glass vase	circa 1814	50 × 33 cm oil on paper	Victoria and Albert Museum , London
	Cloud study	1821	37 × 49 cm oil on paper	National Gallery of Victoria , Melbourne
	The Grove, or the Admiral's House, Hampstead The Admiral's house in Hampstead	1821-22	60 × 50 cm oil on canvas	Old National Gallery Berlin
	Salisbury Cathedral	1821-22	89 × 114 cm oil on canvas	Museu de Arte de São Paulo
	The Cornfield The cornfield	1826	143 × 122 cm oil on canvas	National Gallery , London
	Seascape Study with Rain Cloud Seascape with rain clouds	1827	22.2 × 31.1 cm oil on sized paper	Royal Academy of Arts , London

Exhibitions

• 2014/2015: Constable. The Making of a Master . Victoria & Albert Museum , London. Companion book.

Quotes

• Constable compared his painting with feeling when he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821: "Painting is but another word for feeling". (Quoted from: Parkinson 1998, p. 9.)
• I want to show you that our profession is a profession with a proper education; it is as scientific as it is poetic, and imagination alone has never - and never will - produce works that stand up to comparison with reality. (Quoted from: Thornes 2004, p. 148.)
• Painting is a science and should be practiced as an investigation into the laws of nature. Why not consider landscape painting as a branch of natural philosophy where the pictures are just the experiments? (Quoted from: Thornes 2004, p. 148.)

literature

• Peter D. Smith: Constable . 1st edition. Südwest, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-517-00836-2 (Original title: Constable . Translated by Armin Winkler).
• Ian Fleming-Williams: Constable and his Drawings . Philip Wilson Publishers, London 1990, ISBN 0-85667-380-3 .
• Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming-Williams: Constable . The Tate Gallery June 13 to September 15, 1991. Tate Publishing, London 1991, ISBN 1-85437-071-5 (English).
• Ronald Parkinson: John Constable. The Man and His Art . V & A, London 1998, ISBN 1-85177-243-X .
• Viktoria von der Brüggen: Between an oil sketch and a picture . Studies on the works of John Constable, Eugène Delacroix and Adolph Menzel . 1st edition. Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / New York / Oxford / Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-631-50207-9 ( dissertation ).
• John E. Thornes: John Constable. Art and meteorology . In: Heinz Spielmann, Ortrud Westheider (Hrsg.): Wolkenbilder. The discovery of the sky . Hirmer, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7774-2135-9 (exhibition catalog).
• Mark Evans: Constable. The Making of a Master . V&A Publishing, London UK 2014, ISBN 978-1-85177-800-3 .
• Constable, John . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 6 : Châtelet - Constantine . London 1910, p. 982 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : John Constable  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about John Constable in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry in artcyclopedia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming-Williams: Constable. The Tate Gallery June 13 to September 15, 1991. London 1991, pp. 19 f.
2. ^ Ian Fleming-Williams: Constable and his Drawings. London 1990, p. 66.
3. ^ Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming-Williams: Constable. The Tate Gallery June 13 to September 15, 1991. London 1991, p. 27.
4. ↑ Parkinson: John Constable. 1998, p. 33 f.
5. ↑ You can only become an inventor if you know the inventions of others in FAZ of December 11, 2014, page 13