John Constable

Constable’s work is considered a landmark in the development of plein air painting which culminated in Impressionism. Like Pissarro later in Pontoise, he preferred to paint in a few well-defined localities, exploiting them exhaustively. Favorite stamping grounds were his native Suffolk, Hampstead Heath near London, and the south coast.

Constable’s ambition, like Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) in the seventeenth century, was to elevate landscape to the status of history painting. Since the Baroque era, history painters had prepared their finished work with oil sketches, and Constable did the same, using sketches made on the spot as a direct source for his larger works, which he called ‘six footers.’ What was exceptional was his making, in the studio, full-scale preparatory sketches for his Royal Academy entries. His great gift, like Corot (1796 – 1875) was to translate the freshness of his sketches into his big finished canvases with minimal dilution. His paintings of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ may have socio-political overtones: the well-ordered countryside and prosperous landed estates like Wivenhoe Park, all flourishing under benign constitutional rule, are like a reproach to the despotic turmoil of Napoleonic Europe.