Noted artists of the English school

175 
after him, but Constable started painting at an early age, and convinced his 
father to let him follow art as a career.He married Maria Bicknell in 1816, and 
they had seven children. She died in 1829 of tuberculosis. 
His paintings are treasures of British art, but in his lifetime his work 
was appreciated more in France. Constable's most famous painting, 
The Hay 
Wain
(now in the National Gallery in London), was first shown at the Paris 
Salon in 1824. He had to wait until he was 52 years old before the Royal 
Academy voted that he should be a member. 
Constable was influenced by the French painter Claude Lorrain. His 
most famous paintings are landscapes showing the countryside around 
Dedham and Flatford, where his father's mills were. 
Constable's idea was to use nature itself, rather than imagination. He told 
Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to 
do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".
Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the 
market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, on-the-spot studies were essential. He 
never just followed a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days 
are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree 
alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, 
like those of nature, are all distinct from each other".
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his 
landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. 
These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were 
revolutionary at the time. The sketches for 
The Leaping Horse
 and 
The Hay 
Wain
 study convey a vigour missing from his finished oil paintings of the 
same subjects. Compare the composition of this preliminary study with the 
finished painting: 
The Hay Wain
 final. Possibly more than any other aspect of 
Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him to be an avant-garde painter, 

one who showed that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new 
direction. 
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time. The 
almost mystical 
Stonehenge
, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often 
considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.
[2]
 When he 
exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious 
monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as 
much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the 
present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a 
totally unknown period".
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed 
numerous studies of landscapes and clouds, to become more scientific in his 
recording of atmospheric conditions. 
The Chain Pier
, 1827, for example, 
prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic 
humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella".
The sketches were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in 
the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used 
broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he worked over lighter 
passages. This gave an impression of sparkling light over the landscape. One 
of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is 
Seascape Study 
with Rain Cloud
, painted in around 1824 at Brighton, which captures with 
slashing dark brushstrokes an exploding shower at sea.
Constable also 
became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in 
Salisbury 
Cathedral from the Meadows
, 1831, and in 
Cottage at East Bergholt
, 1833. 
To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of 
the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, 
believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief 
organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting.
In this habit he is known to have 
been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on 

177 
the classification of clouds.
"I have done a good deal of skying", Constable 
wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821.
Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to 
be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it 
worth picking up".
He could never have imagined how influential his honest 
techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only 
contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the 
French impressionists of the late nineteenth century. 

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