Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings

last updated 8 January 2015

Forget what you thought you knew about John Constable, said Joanna Shaw-Eagle in The Washington Times. In two turbulent centuries since his death, the English painter's bucolic landscapes have come to seem staid, even cute. But every so often a museum 'œtransforms a major painter's reputation with a single show.' The National Gallery's gathering of the artist's largest paintings shows Constable, far from being stodgy, to be 'œone of England's most revolutionary artists.' For the first time, his enormous preparatory sketches are displayed right next to finished works. Worked up from outdoor studies, many 'œare so loosely and freely painted' they recall nothing so much as Jackson Pollock's abstract drip paintings. The contrast between them and the highly intricate oils they became could hardly be more extreme.

Constable's odd method was the result of both high artistic ambitions and the demands of the marketplace, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. He aimed to give viewers 'œa kind of direct, unvarnished access' to nature. For that, he needed to paint outdoors. But for his landscapes to stand out in that era's crowded galleries, they needed to be large and detailed—too large and detailed to fit on an outdoor easel. Constable's full-size sketches were a way of thinking in paint, a place where he could capture a fleeting moment in nature, then play with different ways of treating it. In the final painting, his original flurries of brushwork are reduced to a few telling stokes. 'œNo other artist ever worked this way.' But, then, no one else ever captured England's countryside quite so vividly.