Caught Moments

Beneath vast, shifting vistas of fleecy clouds, the softly rolling land is marvelously fat and fertile, husbanded by generations of farmers to support plump cattle and rich green wheat. It is the Stour River Valley, a place of running streams and slow canals northeast of London, and almost from the moment he was born in 1776 John Constable cherished it with an early and sure instinct. "The sound of water escaping from milldams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork--I love such things," he wrote. "I had often thought of pictures of them before I ever touched a pencil."

It seemed just the time for such painting. Wordsworth was hymning the virtues of Lucy's untrodden ways, Rousseau hailed the natural man, Thomas Gray's ploughman had plodded his weary wav homeward, and William Blake deplored the "dark satanic mills" that despoiled England's green and pleasant land. But most of Constable's contemporaries were concerned, as Constable often complained, with "the elevated and noble walks of art, i.e., preferring the shaggy posterior of a satyr to the moral feeling of landscape."

Sixty-six illustrations of Constable's signal accomplishments may now be seen at Washington's National Gallery, all from the private collection of Paul Mellon, president of the gallery. It was Constable's moral feeling for the countryside of England, outgoing Gallery Director John Walker points out in the catalogue, that is his principal achievement. "More than any other artist, he was able to embody in paint Wordsworth's 'Impulse from a Vernal Wood,' " Walker writes. "He remains among artists the high priest of pantheism, the primate of a new religion of natural beauty."

During his lifetime, Constable painstakingly built his reputation on half-a-dozen large, carefully organized "studio" pictures that he showed at the annual exhibitions of Britain's stuffy Royal Academy. To please contemporary taste, these pictures usually centered on some narrative incident, such as a white horse being ferried across the Stour. But many of the works on view are preliminary oil sketches and studies. Some critics argue that these quick sketches have a freshness and spontaneity that were lost in the labor of producing the larger final pictures.

Dew and Snow. Half a century before the Impressionists, Constable was fascinated by the effects of light--in particular, light that came from his beloved and changeable English sky. His ambition, he said, was to "give one moment caught from fleeting time a lasting and sober existence." In his sketches are dozens of studies of clouds. He strove to capture the sparkling play of light on leaves, grass and stones. To achieve this, he daubed little blobs of white and color onto his canvases, making no attempt to blend them--as can be seen in his enchanting little study of Rushes by a Pond.

In life as in his art, Constable was a late bloomer. At the age of 33, he fell in love with Maria Ricknell, the 21-year-old granddaughter of a crusty, wealthy Stour Valley rector, who threatened to cut her out of his will if she married the impecunious painter. Prudently, Constable and Maria waited seven years. Finally, in 1816 his father died, leaving him with enough of an inheritance at 40 to marry and support a wife and children (they had seven). Virtually all Constable's greatest paintings were done after his marriage.

Maria died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1829, and her death utterly shattered Constable. "The face of the world is totally changed for me," he told a friend. He wore mourning for the nine remaining years of his life. To assuage his sorrow, he turned to a sketch that he had made of the ruins of Hadleigh castle, which stood near the mouth of the Thames. In the completed painting, while the ruined castle becomes a monument to Constable's grief, the scudding clouds, the glistening rocks and the sparkling leaves display a fervent commitment to self-renewing life.

Constable always lived under the artistic shadow of J.M.W. Turner, who was almost exactly his own age but far more successful in contemporary eyes. In retrospect, it seems as if the dashing Turner should have been the neglected revolutionary and Constable the acclaimed conservative. But Turner, however radical his techniques, still painted the grand subjects and the dramatic scenes congenial to the Romantic taste; by contrast, Constable's themes seemed merely homely. Turner was a poet of the imagination, Constable a poet of the real. Turner saw a vision of hell in a snow storm; Constable could see a vision of heaven in a blade of grass. Posterity can be grateful to both.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.