“Constable’s Great Landscapes:
The Six-Foot Paintings”
The National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
October 1, 2006 – December 31, 2006
The large landscape paintings of John Constable, from The White Horse (1819) to the sketch for Stoke-by-Nayland (c. 1835–7), are among the most arresting landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, yet their importance has not not always been fully appreciated. The so-called “six-footers” (none is exactly that size) are currently the subject of a splendid exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, each painting shown alongside a full-size study, which exerts a particular power of its own. And therein, to an extent, lies the rub.
In their day, Constable’s landscapes made, if not a splash, then at least a considerable ripple, when they were shown at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions. The sheer size of the works was itself a bid to attract the eye of the Academy, claiming for landscape painting a grandeur of scale commonly reserved for the historical subjects then in vogue. None, however, was sufficient to propel Constable to the full-fledged membership in the Academy that he dearly sought, that is not until the late 1820s. Constable received more interest from France—not least from the dealer John Arrowsmith and, famously, from Delacroix—than from his native England. When he was finally elected to the Academy, he was in his early fifties. By comparison, his coeval J. M. W. Turner had become a full Academician twenty-seven years before. Turner’s mythical resonance and historical themes appealed more to contemporary taste than Constable’s paintings from observed nature, a subject that was seen as mundane.
In the twentieth century, the six-footers were beset by a different problem of taste. The critics Kenneth Clarke and Roger Fry proclaimed the sketches better than the finished paintings. This would have been quite a shock to Constable. Little known in the artist’s day, the oil sketches were for the most part dispersed at a posthumous sale in 1838 and not seen again for decades, when they began to appear in shows in England.
As Charles Rhyne notes in the National Gallery’s thorough, well-written catalogue, the wheels for this apparently modern take were put into motion by Charles Holmes in Constable and His Influence on Landscape Painting (1902). Holmes was the first to tout the “pictorial breadth and harmony” of the sketches over the detail-laden finished works. Fry, writing in Reflections on British Paintng (1934), emphatically extended this claim for the sketches: Constable’s Academy paintings, Fry argues,
are almost always compromises with his real idea. He watered that down, filling it out with redundant statements of detail which merely satisfy an idle curiosity and inevitably obscures the essential theme… . Fortunately, however, he frequently did full-size studies for these pictures, and it is to those and to the sketches that we must turn to find the real Constable.
The notion that the oil sketch, with its febrile vitality and punch, could top the finished picture for bare-knuckled expressiveness is a familiar one—though surprisingly not a modern one. The rawness of the study began to rival the finish of the completed work much earlier than one might think. One important waypoint on the ascent of the sketch was an assertion by Denis Diderot, who, in his Salon of 1765, wrote: “A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture. It is the artist’s work when he is full of inspiration and ardour, when reflection has toned down nothing, it is the artist’s soul expressing itself freely.” Fry seems to agree.
From the vantage point of this exhibition, it’s less important to establish the greatness of the sketches over the finished paintings (or vice versa), though if pushed I would make a case for the finished works. Both assert their own particular force on the viewer in a way that recalls Archilochus’s agile fox and pensive hedgehog: the finished paintings know many things, while the sketches know one big thing. That is to say, that what affects the viewer so palpably, so immediately, in the sketches is their overarching emotional torque. The expressiveness of the sketches sounds largely in one replete and sonorous register.
The finished pictures, by contrast, contain many striking passages that, in their detail and modulation of light, express a multiplicity of experience. Perhaps no single effect in the finished pictures can match the wallop of the sketches, yet one would should resist giving them short shrift. The “vitality” (in Fairfield Porter’s term) has not been painted out, only expressed with greater variety. Particularly daring and energetic are the passages of knifed-on paint found in a river or a clump of scrub that rival Turner in their suggestiveness, but remain fully rooted in observed nature.
The finished works—Stratford Mill (1820), The Hay Wain (1821), Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) and others—can be entered at various points (through a whorl of branches, across the evocative green middle distance, through a brooding cloud-filled sky) before the eye pulls back to address the whole. The overall effect is both strange and teeming, both more prim and more wild than the sketches. In their minute flecks of color and almost obsessive finish, they announce Constable’s unfashionable and uncompromising vision in ways that still astonish.