Constable [antikvár]

Constable Constable was a painter of the particular rather than the general, the actual, rather than the ideal. 'No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world.' His greatest originality lies in this belief and in his attempt to enshrine the precise time of day on canvas and the freshness of the English weather. 'I like de landscape of Constable but he makes me call for my great coat and umbrella.' Fuseli's praise of Constable underlines the latter's success in depicting the shifting and watery quality of the weather. For Constable tried to achieve not only truth to nature, truth to what he actually saw in front of his eyes without selection or rejection, but also truth to the atmosphere, in a strictly meteorological sense. He painted the freshness and sparkle of the landscape under sun and rain. He took to heart Benjamin West's advice, 'Light and shadow never stand still'. In a letter to C. R. Leslie, his first biographer, Constable wrote in 1833 that Lady Morley had said of one of his pictures, 'How fresh, how dewy, how exhilarating!' and he added, 'I told her half of this, if I could think I deserved it, was worth all the talk and cant about pictures in the world.' Constable's is a revolutionary art. In its time it was radical and uncompromising, going against the accepted conventions of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Eighteenth-century English landscape painters had produced pictures that were usually generalized and idealized depictions of nature, based on their study of pictures, rather than their study of the actual landscape. Often they were pale imitations or pastiches of Claude; sometimes they derived from the work of Dutch seventeenth-century landscapists such as Ruisdael; always these painters were, in Constable's own words - strictures, in fact, on his own early work - 'running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'. They followed certain accepted conventions about how foliage should be painted, how the composition should be built up and organized, what colours should be used, what should be included and what should be left out. Constable rejected all this. He went to nature at its source and tried to forget that he had ever seen a picture before. Like his contemporary, William Wordsworth, he was doing something new, something which had never been done before, and, as Wordsworth had rejected the poetic diction and conventions of the Augustan poets. Constable rejected the pictorial language of eighteenth-century landscape painters. He recognized that he was breaking new ground and realized that his chosen path was hard. In his Preface to the English Landscape Scenery, a series of engravings in mezzotint after his work published from 1830, he wrote: 'In art, there are two modes by which men aim at Fig. 1 Self-Portrait PENCIL, 19 X 14.5 CM. 1806. EXECUTORS OF LT.-COL. J.H. CONSTABLE