John Constable was an English painter during the Romantic period. He was active during a time when landscapes and natural settings were the most popular artistic subjects. Just as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared in their manifesto, Lyrical Ballads, Constable once proclaimed in a letter to a friend, "painting is but another word for feeling." Much of Constable's fame came to him posthumously. During his lifetime he did not achieve commercial or financial success and was not admitted to the Royal Academy until he was fifty-two years old. He was, however, more popular in France than in his native England.
Constable was born to a wealthy merchant family and expected to join the family business when he reached adulthood. He was provided with an education and then began to work in the family's mills. Miserable, he turned again to his favored childhood pastime, sketching and painting. He later attributed his talent to the bucolic scenes of his rural upbringing. In 1799, Constable at last convinced his father that he was not meant for the family business. The elder Constable agreed to provide his son a small allowance and permitted him to enroll in the Royal Academy School. During this period, Constable excelled in his studies and was particularly influenced by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, and Peter Paul Rubens. He developed a style that remained with him during his entire career as a painter. Contemporaries and art historians state that Constable somewhat prefigured the Impressionists, with his strong interest in color, light, and texture. He favored scenes of everyday life, which were in keeping with the ideals of the Romantic Movement.
In 1816 he married his childhood sweetheart, Maria Bicknell. Her family was very much opposed to the match, though Constable's parents gave their blessing. Both his parents died that year, leaving one-fifth of the family business profits to their second eldest son, John. The young couple had seven children, though following the birth of the youngest child; Maria's health began to fail. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died in 1828. Constable wore mourning black for the rest of his life. According to a contemporary, after his wife's death he fell "prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts." He raised the seven children to adulthood, however. Late in life he gave a number of public lectures on the history of landscape painting. The lectures were well attended by some of the most prominent figures in British art and allied fields.
Image: Self-portrait 1806, pencil on paper, Tate Gallery London. Constable drew this profile, his only indisputable self-portrait, through an arrangement of mirrors. |