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For two textual review of the show 'Late Constable at the Royal Academy' please see below
Constable exhibiton reviews
Constable exhibiton reviews
Laura Cummings
Laura Cummings
Late Constable review – a thrilling enigma
Stonehenge, 1835 by John Constable.
‘All skywriting and radiant cloud’: Stonehenge, 1835 by John Constable. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Royal Academy, London
Turbulent, fervent and mostly unseen in his lifetime, the late paintings of John Constable are at once figurative, abstract and staggering to behold
A hard rain falls on a glittering grey sea. Wind harries sullen clouds across low-lying horizons. Overcast skies shed a pale glare on the churned earth below. Thunder and gloom, turbid brown rivers, corn standing solid as a wall at the field’s edge beneath squalls of paint, thick as mortar. This is summer in John Constable’s England.
Or, to be more precise, it is the season of late Constable (1776-1837), painted in the grief of bereavement. The Royal Academy’s stupendous new show may open with some early cloud studies and Constable’s The Leaping Horse, last of his so-called Six-Footers, but almost everything here was made after the death of his wife, Maria, in 1828. Constable was left to raise seven young children on his own, at the age of 52. He wore mourning for the rest of his life.
The devastating oil “sketch” of Hadleigh Castle, for instance, was painted during her final illness. With its ruined towers and black birds circling in the chill white air above endless flatlands, this desolate vision is shot through with sorrow and fear. Its origins lie in a pencil sketch made even before he met Maria, as if a dark memory of life before her was suddenly resurfacing in this storm of turbulent brushstrokes. “I shall never feel again as I have felt,” Constable wrote to his brother, “– the face of the World is totally changed to me.”
Like The Leaping Horse – in which river, rider, barge and horse are barely distinguishable up close in the mass of claggy paint – the sketch for Hadleigh Castle is entirely without precedent. Five or six feet wide, painted on canvases that were probably tacked to the studio wall, these so-called sketches are an amalgam of spontaneously veering brushstrokes that scarcely shape themselves to the scenes they describe. Constable worked on them for months at a time, saying only that they were not for public consumption, compared to the finished “exhibition” versions. They cost him dearly, made him nothing, and were never shown in his lifetime.
What you are looking at, before all else, is the mysterious behaviour and potential of paint
But they are the essence of this show, which brims with art made mainly for himself. Dawn breaks as a needle of white paper in a swathe of dark ink. A woman below a tree melts like wax in seething brown oil paint. A sketchbook lies open, showing Constable’s watercolour of a Sussex chalk bank, newly eroded to reveal the spectacle of a human skeleton. In the Tate’s famous Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows it is almost impossible to dredge the people and animals from the morass of liquid river: either as figures or just separate brushstrokes.
These paintings are turbulent, agitated, staggering to behold. The eye inches over the surface as if searching for fossils in shale or shells on a beach, startled by every tiny incident. Everywhere you look there is some outlandish mark, as often made with a blade as a brush. The paint pools, sticks, butters the canvas, grazes the weave; it is viscous, slow-moving, dense, always strangely opaque. No matter what the titles claim – that this is Old Sarum, Flatford Lock or Brighton Beach – what you are looking at, before all else, is the mysterious behaviour and potential of paint.
Late Constable never pretends to simple illusion. An almost comically candid notice next to A Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge acknowledges that “the brushstrokes make the objects in this painting a bit difficult to see”. This is meant to reassure young visitors, but might do as well for adults faced with one of Constable’s most inchoate works. And there are a couple of other paintings in this show where the subject – a biscuit-tin cottage surrounded by hollyhocks, say – is far less interesting than the way it is made.
People are diminutive, as lost in these landscapes as Wordsworth’s Lucy, ethereal heroine of the Lyrical Ballads, “half hidden from the eye”. Commissioned to illustrate As You Like It, Constable draws a tree flaring upwards; it is more or less impossible to distinguish the melancholy Jacques slumped among its roots. His commemoration of Sir Joshua Reynolds, dead president of the Royal Academy, shows only an empty plinth in a glade. Look at his quickfire sketch of Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, bequeathed to the RA when Constable was an academician, and you would scarcely know he was depicting a sculpture so much as spectres flickering like fire: a vision of motion, force and spirit.
On the River Stour, c1834-7.
A Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge (‘On the Stour’), c1834–6. Photograph: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Constable tried and failed to become an academician year after mortifying year, snubbed every time. He was a student at the RA Schools in his early 20s, and consistently showed in the annual exhibition. But he was not elected until the approach of his 53rd birthday. The present show is a yet more belated recognition from the Royal Academy, therefore: its first survey since Constable’s unexpected death at the age of 60.
Anyone looking at these late works can hardly help noticing what Turner liked to mock: the peculiarly conspicuous dabs, specifically of red, with which Constable indicates a dog’s tongue, a jacket, a distant figure. The difference between these two contemporaries is proverbial: in essence, dematerialisation versus its painterly opposite. But both were radical beyond anything ever known in English art.
Stonehenge, painted by Constable, is a collection of tumbled rocks beneath the far greater phenomenon of the empyrean – the swooping, rushing heavens, all skywriting and radiant cloud. Two beams from outer space, as it seems, hurtle straight down to the centre of the circle: rainbows of brilliant light arriving from before ancient time.
Dark rivers stir, black on black, in the enormous oil sketches. Look deeply, and every passage is crammed with sensation: the memory of damp undergrowth, the smoky chill of autumn, droplets sounding on still water. Yet none are specifically described. The cliche is that Constable prefigures modernism, specifically abstract expressionism. But his marks are so wild and fervent they make the Americans look orderly, even while remaining somehow figurative.
Rainstorm Over the Sea, c1824-28 by John Constable.
Rainstorm Over the Sea, c1824-28 by John Constable. Photograph: Royal Academy of Arts, London
And Constable can do this even on the least scale. One of the greatest works here is among the smallest, not much bigger than a paperback. It shows the sea far away across a beach, glowering and sparking beneath an oncoming storm. The horizon is scored in with the handle of the brush, the clouds rapidly pressed around the sky. It is a thrilling sight, heavy with doom, yet painted with superb precision. Until, that is, something breaks in the painting – and perhaps also in the painter. Black rain starts to rush down the surface in violent sweeps, as if the centre could not hold. But is it weather, or is it pure paint, and which do you see first – the exhilarating enigma of late Constable.
Late Constable is at the Royal Academy, London, until 13 February 2022
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones
The volcanic, uncontrollable visions of a master reborn – Late Constable
The volcanic, uncontrollable visions of a master reborn – Late Constable
Royal Academy, London
Forget the rural idylls. This sublime show recasts John Constable as the godfather of the avant garde, producing explosive, nightmarish paintings of a vanishing world
There was no honking traffic on the A303 near Stonehenge when John Constable captured the monument in 1835, no visitor centre, no crowds circling the perimeter in an endless flow. In his watercolour, the site stands alone and utterly mysterious, with just a handful of sightseers dwarfed by colossal semi-collapsed stones. But the real drama is in the sky: an ever-shifting veil of blue, shot through with white and rippling with energy like an electric field. As an observation of nature, it makes no sense, in particular the two immense arcs that cut through the atmosphere, plunging down upon the stones. These spectacular sights have no origin in the natural world: they have come from inside the painter.
Late Constable, the much-awaited show at the Royal Academy in London, tells the story of an artist losing his cool – and discovering an inner fire so strong that it compelled him to make modern art in the early 19th century. Constable believed when he was young that a painter should simply record what he sees.
Born in 1776, he rejected the romantic and gothic cliches of the time to paint his own locality in Suffolk and his later home at Hampstead, then a village north of London, with a raw truth. He pioneered painting in the open air, direct from nature. But in this wuthering exhibition, you see him discover the cracks in reality – and fall right through them.
It starts with some of Constable’s cloud studies, little oil sketches of the sky above his head. These appear to be scientific observations of the weather: untainted observations of the furry white formations up there in the blue (it’s the perfect British art subject: clouds). But later in the exhibition, there’s a drawing that puts these apparently simple pictures in a new light. It is a sketch of yet more clouds – brooding and gathering, their surfaces flecked with squiggles that could be birds or imaginary scars on the sky.
But this work, called Cloud Study with Verses from Broomfield, is not just a meteorological analysis – for below his darkening sky, Constable has scribbled a long quotation from the poet Robert Broomfield, famous in the early 1800s as a rural worker who wrote about nature: “The misty vapours catch the silverlight … ” Far from being a quiet observer of the rustic scene, Constable identifies here as a painter-poet, seeing a mirror of his emotions in the natural world.
And in case you have a crude conception of Constable as a “conservative” cheerleader for a mythically unchanging English countryside, note that he is quoting a working-class writer. On the evidence of this exhibition, the Turner prize should be relaunched (and God knows it needs a jolt) as the Constable prize – for Constable in his later works is the true radical, the true modernist. This sketch explicitly tells us how he came to see himself: a Romantic painter, a poet in paint.
You see him at his most confoundingly poetic in two versions of his big canvas The Leaping Horse, hung spectacularly side by side. Constable loved to make his rapid, condensed oil sketches on pieces of board – but to get recognition at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, he knew he needed to splurge on canvas, large ones he called his “six-footers”.
The Leaping Horse is a tantalising, unforgettable glimpse of a lost rural world. It’s not a big story about war or royalty or the famous. Instead, a youth on a horse is towing a barge through a lock on a country canal. His horse rears up, while a silver tree burns like magnesium against the steamy clouds. On the boat, a red-coated man seems to be in charge (an old soldier?) while a woman, also in what may be a veteran’s red jacket, looks after her child at the prow.
Yet if you look at the equally large oil sketch beside it, the scene appears to have melted. Trees collapse in fistfuls of black leaves, the horse is a brown smear, the sky an explosive, jagged foreboding of mayhem. There’s no woman on the boat but, instead, two dark silhouettes near the stern. It’s like a nightmare version of Constable’s rural dream.
Place of ghosts… Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
This contrast between composed, beautiful scenes and their despairing doubles recurs again and again in this ground-shifting show. From our 21st-century perspective, it seems that the broken, scarred, morbid versions of such works as Hadleigh Castle must be the later interpretations. Yet these are actually the preparatory works, the full-sized oil sketches. When Constable produces his finished six-footer to exhibit at the Royal Academy show, he balances the light and clarifies the details – in short, he makes it more acceptable as a picture for polite society in the 1820s and 30s. Hadleigh Castle loses the scratched furious sky and menacing birds that make the earlier sketch so bleak. It becomes almost picturesque in the finished canvas.
What we are seeing is an artist attempting to control volcanic emotions. Constable aspired to give his scenes a harmony and fullness that was the ideal of landscape painting from the Renaissance onwards, perfectly expressed by the French painter Claude, whose classical compositions were among the first art Constable saw.
Constable was sensitive to the emissions starting to poison the skies: he hated London’s smoke
Not that there’s anything wrong with a landscape you can escape into like a summer daydream. The Cornfield, lent by the National Gallery, is a glorious window on a vanished pre-industrial age: a country lane opens on to a golden landscape, a shepherd boy drinks from a fresh pure stream as his dog looks after the flock. It’s an idyll. But rather than sniffily point out that Constable’s perfect countryside is a nostalgic fantasy, how about seeing in such scenes the last lovely glimpses of the world before industrialism took over? Constable was sensitive to the emissions starting to poison the skies: he hated London’s smoke and, in his painting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, included a malign factory belching pollution.
So even Constable at his most daydreamy is a modern artist now, mourning a world the factories were already staring to destroy. Everything he loved is in the past. His nostalgia is agonising. The Glebe Farm is a lovely hovel, a fairytale home – but in the oil sketch, it’s swallowed by a tangled mass of trees and storm-filled clouds. The night is coming. A Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge has a sky like smashed glass. White shards glitter against greyness. It is as apocalyptic as an El Greco, as fragmentary as cubism. For this exhibition even makes Constable look a little like the godfather of the French avant garde. That impossible sky doesn’t just anticipate the plein air paintings of Monet or Renoir but, in its crystalline abstraction, the broken world of Cézanne and the convulsed nature of Van Gogh.
Constable balances his two selves, the wild inner Romantic and the rational painter who loved Claude’s classicism, in his masterpiece Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is an autumn view of the estate of Sir George Beaumont, a wealthy art collector who showed the young Constable his Claudes and encouraged his artistic ambitions. In the depths of a dense planted wood, we see the stone monument Beaumont erected to Reynolds, the Royal Academy’s founder. It seems an almost excessively emotional act – Reynolds was a rich artist who died in his bed, not a war hero slain in battle - but that very hysteria is what makes the painting so powerful.
Since it is a cenotaph, an empty tomb, Constable can fill it with as many ghosts as he likes. He mourns Beaumont, who was dead when he painted this, as well as his wife. Death and sorrow gather in the fallen brown leaves of a wood, so thick you walk out of the exhibition on a carpet of autumnal grief.
But you can’t avoid comparisons with Turner. And here at the Royal Academy, they did have a showdown at one of its exhibitions, when Turner looked at Constable’s entry then added a brilliant blast of red to his own seascape to put his rival in the shade. This time the tables are turned. Looking at Constable’s seas, it’s obvious he is trying to compete with Turner. And finally, he pulls it off, with Rainstorm Over the Sea.
It must have started out as a careful composition: the beach in the foreground, the distant sails on a fairly calm sea, all depicted sombrely. But like a sudden transformation in the weather, he has a change of heart. Out of the gathering cloud, Constable creates his own blast of rain, falling in fast streaks of black and white. All those mighty seas by Turner are put in their place by this simple swerve of the brush, full of the roar of nature and the turbulence of Constable.
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