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UNIT VII CONSTABLE (1776-1837)
The mainstream of English painting in the first half of the nineteenth century was landscape.
Constable and Turner, the greatest of the landscapists, approached nature with excitement. At that
time nature was beginning to be swallowed up by the expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution.
John Constable, the son of a miller on the River Stour in Suffolk, honoured all that was natural
and traditional, including the age-old occupation of farmer, miller, and carpenter, close to the land
whose fruits and forces they turned to human use. He loved the poetic landscapes of Gainsborough,
he studied the constructed compositions of the Baroque, he admired Ruisdael's skies. Rebelling
against the brown tonality then fashionable in landscape painting - actually the result of discoloured
varnish darkening the Old Masters – he supplemented his observations of nature with a study of the
vivacity of Rubens's colour and brushwork.
As early as 1802, Constable started to record the fleeing aspects of the sky in the rapid oil
sketches made outdoors. "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which sky is not the
keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment," he wrote. Constable systematically
studied cloud formation in 1821-22. These studies show his surrender to the forces of nature, a
passionate self-identification with sunlight, wind, and moisture.
Constable never left England and made dutiful sketching tours through regions of
acknowledged scenic beauty. His superb The Hay Wain, of 1821, sums up his ideals and his
achievements. Composed as if accidentally - though on the basis of many preliminary outdoor
studies - the picture, painted in the studio, shows Constable's beloved Stour with its trees, a mill,
and distant fields. In his orchestra of natural colour the solo instrument and conductor at once is the
sky. The clouds sweep by, full of light and colour, and their shadows and the sunlight spot the field
with green and gold. As the stream ripples, it mirrors now the trees, now the sky. The trees are
made up of many shades of green and patches of light reflect from their foliage. These white
highlights were called "Constable's snow". The Hay Wain was triumphantly exhibited at the Salon
of 1824, where Constable's broken colour and free brushwork set in motion a new current in French
landscape art, which later culminated in the Impressionist movement. 
In 1829 Constable became member of the Royal Academy. 
In later life, after the death of his wife, Constable entered a period of depression in which his
passionate communion with nature reached a pitch of semi-mystical intensity. One of his late pic-
tures is Stroke-by-Nayland, of 1836-37, a large canvas in which the distant church tower, the
wagon, the plough, the horses, and the boy looking over the gate are instruments on which light
plays. The symphonic breadth, of the picture, and its crushing chords of colour painted in a rapid
technique, bring to the finished painting the immediacy of the colour sketch. Such pictures are
equalled in earlier art only by certain landscape backgrounds in Titian or by the mythical reveries of
the late Rembrandt.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the following words:
Constable [
]; Turner [
]; Ruisdael [
] Stour [
]; Suffolk
[
]; chords [
]; triumphantly [
]; varnish [
]; palette
[
]; plough [
]; wain [
]; flexible [
]; culminated [
];
plank [
]
NOTES
The Hay Wain - "Телега для сена"
Suffolk - Суффолк (графство)
Stour - р. Ст(а)ур
TASKS
I. Read the text. Make sure you understand it. Mark the following statements true or false.
1. Constable was the greatest English portraitist.
2. In the first half of the eighteenth century nature was beginning to be swallowed up by the
expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution.
3. Discoloured varnish darkened the Old Masters.
4. Constable often visited Italy, Belgium, Holland and Spain.
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