Original subtitles

There have been few more powerful painters of landscape than John Constable.

He brought a scale, ambition and impact to a subject lawn considered amongst the lowest

forms of art, but he's largely celebrated as an nostalgic painter of a lost England.

Look a little harder at Constable's pictures, though, and you discover an intense and radical

vision at work, which changed the course of British art.

John Constable was born in June 1776, here in East Burkhold, a small village in Suffolk.

He was the son of Anne and Golden Constable, a successful businessman, and he was

christened in this church.

But the real hubbub of family life, and his early childhood, was a mile just down the road.

This is Clapford Mill, Constable's father's mill, here on the banks of the river

Starr, and it was this that was the very centre of the family business.

In fact, Constable's father owned another water mill upriver, and also a windmill,

as well as a boat building business and the navigation rights on this very busy stretch

of water.

All of which provided the backdrop for Constable's carefree, happy, comfortable childhood.

But it also fueled his art for the rest of his life.

Throughout the 1790s, the young Constable spent his time sketching the rolling countryside

which surrounded him.

And just as the century was coming to a close, Constable's parents reluctantly consented

to their son leaving Suffolk, and traveling to London to attend the academy schools.

1800-2 was a key year for Constable.

In April, he had his first exhibited painting at the Royal Academy.

We don't know exactly what it was, but all accounts seem to point to a landscape.

Then he was offered a job teaching at a Royal Military Academy, which in the end he declined

because as he put it, it will be a death blow to any prospects I might have, a pursue

in the art I love.

And then he makes his most famous resolution.

He says, I now vow to become a natural painter.

And this is one of a series of three or four works he makes in the summer of 1802,

where we can see Constable trying to achieve what he set out to do.

Now, the idea of a natural painter is a slippery one, and it changes throughout Constable's career.

He says at the beginning, though, that he wants to produce a pure and unaffected view of nature.

And he does that by plonking himself out in the fields and trying to sketch

and then paint an oil or he sees.

And the view that he gives us is elevated, looking east across the Stau Valley.

There is deadham with its church beautifully rendered, and then in a distance the estuary, the view out to sea.

Now, at first sight, this looks a pretty good achievement, but there's a couple of things

to throw into the melting pot, certainly we're around the idea of pure naturalism.

Firstly, the composition for this work is taken directly from a work now in the National Gallery,

previously in the collection of George Beaumont, where Constable had seen it called Hegar in the Angel,

by the French artist, Claude Lorraine.

And here on the left hand corner, where things are slightly fudged,

in Claude's original painting, there are two figures wrestling, so he takes that out.

So this is classically inspired.

Secondly, look at the detailing, particularly on the trees and the flaking and the foreground,

and you see an artist wrestling with the medium of oil paint is not something he is naturally

adept at using.

Now, at the Royal Academy, there was no instruction on how to paint, let alone and how to paint landscape.

And what we see in works like this, which make my think real jewels,

is an artist somehow struggling to learn to paint, to learn to master his medium,

and to find his own vision when confronted by nature.

But there was no market for natural paintings, and Constable had no choice,

but to try and support himself by securing commissions for portraits.

But as this painting shows, portraiture wasn't as clearly the exactly perfected.

Constable's struggle for work was temporarily resolved in 1800-9,

when he got a commission to paint an altar piece for this church,

and the village of Neiland, a few miles away from flatford.

He got the commission because he's aren't lived here in the village.

And he produced an image of Christ blessing the sacraments, the bread and the wine,

which hung, as it still does, behind the altar piece.

But his struggle for recognition continued.

And according to his father, Constable's employment relied entirely on the kindness of friends,

and as he put it, his son was still pursuing a shadow.

In the same year, he fell in love with Mariah Bignol,

the daughter of Charles Bignol, the solicitor to the Admiralty.

Mariah's family was skeptical that an out-of-work artist could provide for their daughter,

and so it became even more crucial for Constable to develop his career.

In 1811, Constable came here to the picture-est city of Soulsbury,

to stay with the recently appointed Bishop of Soulsbury, Dr. John Fisher, and his wife.

Fisher himself was an amateur painter who'd met Constable a few years before,

and was very taken with the young artist.

More importantly, Fisher also had an nephew, called John Fisher, too,

who became Constable's closest friend as a result of his stay here.

And for the rest of his life, they wrote letters together, and it's through the letters to John Fisher,

that we know most of what Constable thought about the world and his art.

Equally important, though, for Constable, was this spectacular view.

He stood where I'm standing now with his sketchbook in 1811,

and then, over the next two decades, returned to paint this scene

and produced some of his most iconic work here.

This painting, from a few years later, 1823,

effectively made one of the most celebrated buildings in England

into a national treasure, but Constable's craft as a painter

was crystallized much closer to home.

Constable painted what I think is his first major oil piece

in the summer of 1814 when he was 39, which makes him quite a late developer.

Right here, just near Flatford Mill, and the scene depicts boat building,

which would have taken place down here in the self-same pit.

In fact, very little has changed in the scene.

And we know that Constable made sketches in ink,

but then, set his easel up and works straight onto the finished canvas.

And he worked in two stages.

First of all, he'd lay in using thin, opaque colours,

the basic composition of the men at work,

and the landscape almost as it is now.

And then, after a few days when it's a dried, he'd use

course of more granular paint to put in the fine details,

the foliage, the light, and so on.

But we know from letters that he worked through to the late afternoon,

until, as he says, he could see the smoke,

billowing from Bridge Cottage just next door,

and that was the sign that the fires have been lit,

and the supper was just about to be cooked.

In the sketch, we see a very bustling scene of activity

of boats being built, which is slightly modified

and made more tranquil in the finished oil.

There's a man down there who seems to be resting,

but there's a corner of rope underneath,

and perhaps he's scraping away or carving at some fine detail.

On the banks, just over there, on the flat grass,

a man is shaping a keel, and in the distance on the river

is a man with a finished barge.

It's almost a manual, if you like, of how to build barges.

And even though at this time, England is rapidly industrializing,

and the Napoleonic Wars are coming to a crescendo

at Waterloo a few months later.

Constable is painting an image of a rural world

getting on with its daily life,

and he's celebrating in a way, the quiet drama of the everyday.

This work, called Flatford Mill, seen on a navigable river,

shows the family livelihood, the river that they owned,

golden constables lock, and the mill itself,

and flatford bridge, just visible in the left-hand corner.

And it's a painting like boat building, and it builds on the achievements of boat building,

that shows the countryside in action.

It's a painting that quietly invites you to say,

what's happened, and what's going to happen.

And in fact, it's clear when you look,

because this little gang of two or three barges

have come from the lock and been towed by the boy on the back of the horse,

up river, and then they've jat and I've slightly indripted,

but here's a guy with a pole trying to straighten them,

and then navigate them underneath the bridge.

And you can see how, as the barge is being tethered,

the water is dripping off, and then your eyes are taken

around the two roots of the river, and the painting has a kind of depth to it.

But what brings it to life, and what makes it such a major painting,

centers on the way that Constable paints it.

Constable is declared that painting is a science,

it's an inquiry into the laws of nature.

And even though this is a vast canvas, one of his biggest to date,

all the evidence points to the fact that Constable actually painted this

least initially outside.

Now, we know that he started with a sheet of glass on an easel,

having made various sketches of from this vantage point high up,

and then he draws elements of the composition onto the glass,

using ink, and then he puts paper onto the glass,

and the ink seeps through, and he's got his basic outline.

He then, we also know, makes oil sketches, and works around the subject matter,

and when he starts with his primed canvas, ready for painting,

there'll be a few lines drawn to get the basic shape of the composition,

and then he starts to paint, and he lays in things like the sky,

and he also lays in the main detail of the landscape,

and every tree leaf seems to have its own separate brush stroke,

and there seems to be at least 30 different tones of green here,

rather than just one unified green, and then he puts the dabs of red

to create the flowers that are also the complementary of green,

and there's the tiny detailing of the magpies on the right-hand side

that seem to skate or fly across the surface of the canvas,

which activates it, and when your eye looks at the canvas, it's drawn all over it,

and rather like looking at a scene at in nature, the thing is never still.

And broadly, there are two themes, a ways of looking at this picture.

One is universal, and a kind of timelessness,

embodied by the tiny figure of the Reaper,

thrashing away in the meadow on the extreme right of the picture,

and a symbol of time passing,

and then something specific and personal to constable,

that is embodied in the signature, where it says John Constable 1817,

but it's not as if he's painted it onto the surface of the canvas.

It seems almost as if he's taken a stick and scratched it into the earth,

or rather one of the boys, fishing, lying on the riverbank, has done that,

who in a way, a Constable's alter ego's, a memory of himself, as a young boy.

An ultimate, the painting seems to be a valid diction,

to what Constable himself described as his carefree boyhood.

Within a couple of years, his father dead, and the inheritance allowing him to marry Mariah,

Constable moves here, to hamstered village, north of London.

With the landscape of Suffolk a good day's journey away,

hamstered Heath on the edge of the city was effectively a home from home,

a place to work.

And he'd bring his sketchbooks, and sometimes he's easels,

and he'd study nature, its colours, and its light, and sometimes he'd survey

the burgeoning city, the fastest growing city in Europe,

from which he sometimes wanted to escape.

But he didn't always confront the landscape vertically.

Sometimes, he'd lie in his back, and focused at intense gaze upwards to the clouds.

The sky's orchestrated the mood of a painting for Constable,

and nowhere is this more evident than in a series of monumental canvases, known as his six footers,

can he began to paint in his London studio, including perhaps the most famous landscape ever painted.

This modest, quiet backwater tucked in just behind his father's mill,

inspired one of the most popular and iconic pictures

in all of English painting.

Baywayne, or landscape at noon, is it was called when it was first exhibited in the 1821,

is a fresh, vibrant, comfortable picture.

Constable described it as characteristic of an English landscape,

and there's something of the high-anglic and Tory that is constable in this work,

and I think that struck a chord with many people, it seems to stay off the inevitability of

industrial change. It presents an idealised tranquil world that perhaps was threatened,

and people still liked to heartback to that. But Constable, at this time in his career,

was becoming an increasingly paradoxical artist, and that, I think, is embodied in this work,

because scratch beneath the surface, at least metaphorically, and what you start to see

are the signs of radical change in Constable's practice as an artist.

The view is familiar, Willie Lotz-Cottage on the left, a woman either gathering water for

washing or ringing out the washing in the river. There's a dog in the foreground,

there's a man fishing with his boat just visible on the fire bank,

and a stream of figures in the field in the distance,

thrashing the chord harvesting, and then right center stage is the hayway in itself, a haycard,

that seems to have come from the bank, because you can see the muddy wheels,

then, as made this extraordinary, almost impossible turn, and is now in the process of

turning again to the right, you look at the left hand wheel, to go off to the forward

that flat-forward mill got its name from. Then go across the fields and perhaps pick up the

next bail of hay. Now, some people have challenged some of the details depicted by Constable

in the work, not least the fact that this cart couldn't successfully carry great bales of hay

or the harvest without them falling out the side, the side panelings or bars are not high enough.

Now, what Constable's doing in his own words is selecting and combining from nature.

He's also, as he did with flat-forward mill, seeking to suggest something of, again, what he

calls the ever-nessence of the natural world with these flecked brushstrokes that bring the

surface to life. But finally, he's looking, again, in his own words, for an unadulterated truth

of expression. Now, this is a significant shift, as a young inexperienced painter, he talked

about truth to nature. Now, he's talking about truth to expression. In other words,

how he feels and by extension, how we feel when we stand in front of a work or stand in front

of nature. It's our emotion, our feelings. And in fact, the idea of nature moving Constable

is both a physical sensation, it's never still, and also something that comes from his gut

and his heart. Now, when this work was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1821,

the English were bemused by it, wonderfully ironic given that it's now such an icon.

However, it was bought by a French dealer, taken to Paris, and in 1824, in the French

Salot was awarded a prize by the King of France Charles de Tente, and the French, particularly

the painter Delacua, saw in this work, the seeds of a radical transformation that Constable

himself was able to realise in what I think is his greatest work a year later.

This is the sixth and final one of Constable's big star set pieces, the most powerful,

and by his own account, the most difficult. It shows a horse leaping over,

a gate that's about three feet tall to keep the cattle out, but is enough for the horse

itself to be able to get over it. The horse has just towed a barge upstream, way upstream from

flatford mill, and you can see other barges in the distance that shows what's going to happen next

where this barge will go. Now the location is called Float Jump, which was along the top path,

which Constable used to walk as a young boy on his way to school. It's also the boundary line

along the river star between Essex and Constable's native county of Suffolk, and he's located

himself and the view on the south side in Essex, looking over the river towards his beloved Suffolk,

but of course he's painting this vast six footer in his London studio, and he's

excused the view, and almost symbolically we see on the extreme rise of the canvas,

dead and church, but if we were being true to nature and true to the view as it is,

that church would be somewhere behind us as we stand looking at the work. But as with the hayway,

but more extremely here, that doesn't matter. That's not what the paintings are about.

But the key to the painting, I think, is found in the details.

We can see the water seeping through the slewskates underneath the horse and rider,

and there's a sense of almost being able to hear that water trickling and flowing through,

and Constable draws our attention to that with a faintly discernible net that's put across to

catch eels. But the real sound of the picture starts to emanate from the clattering of the hooves,

as this figure leaps over a modest gate but provides the central drama of the image.

Now Constable is knowingly artistorical here, Leonardo planned a greater question,

statue, Valazquez and Van Dyke painted monumental images of nobleman and kings on great

stallions. What is Constable, though, he puts a common guard and a barge boy on a barge horse.

But in a way, he's saying it's just as heroic. And in the way that he flexed paint around,

he gives us that sensation of actually being on the horse, but of experiencing the wind itself

out of the canvas. And what he's trying to achieve here, and certainly to my mind,

gets very close to it, he's suggesting the idea of landscape as total experience.

Now, have a look at this painting. Apart from the fact that I've changed side,

you probably think something's happened to a television set, or maybe the filter on our camera's

broken. But actually, this is almost the same painting as the leaping horse, but not quite.

It's a full-size sketch that Constable made. And in fact, he's believed to have made two vast

sketched canvases using oil. One of them was supposed to be the finished work.

We now think that that didn't work for him, he dismissed it, and he turned it into this sketch,

but we don't know for certain. But what we do know is that if the finished version of the leaping

horse is landscape as total experience, this final full-size sketch is painting itself as total

experience. It's a work that seems to immerse and pull you in. It's also a work whose images

seem to be shown out of human clay as much as paint. It's a painting which seems to be somewhere

in the process of becoming before your eyes, and at one level Constable arrests this dynamic,

dramatic flickering fleeting moment. But at the same time, he suggests it by the fluid way

that he slaps paint on. And this is work that seems almost, if we use the idea of the horse,

to let painting off the leash, it's untethered. And that suddenly a new way of expressing some

truths about the natural world are made apparent. Now actually, I don't think Constable ever beats

this sketch in the rest of his career. I think very few artists in the history of Western art

get to this level of intensity and passion. Plenty of people have done sketchy works,

but this has a real gravitas, monumentality, grandeur, and passion to it. And it throws down a

missionists throughout the 20th century. His wife Mariah developed tuberculosis, and she and the

children moved to Brighton in 1824, hoping that the sear would improve her health. Constable

made frequent trips between London and Brighton and began making studies of the sea. Although he

didn't like the town and its people, Constable was inspired by the dramatic and changeable weather.

This painting, the chain pair, was another six footer, and the first, depicting a landscape

outside Suffolk. The work itself was attacked by the London magazine, and didn't find a buyer

until Constable's studio auction after his death. The choppy turbulent seas and dark cloud are

often seen as a reflection of Constable's concern for his wife's ill health.

Mariah Constable's health improved enough for to give birth to their seventh child at the beginning

of 1828, but by the summer she was very ill, and in November she died. Constable was

absolutely devastated, the face of the world is changed to me, he said. 14 years before,

when he was head over heels with Mariah just before they got married, he'd come here on a

sketching trip to Hadley Castle, an old medieval ruin, with spectacular views out across the

and it was that image of an isolated decaying ruin that seemed to have struck a chord in his

visual memory, and which prompted him at the end of 1828 to begin one of the most powerful and

moving paintings of his entire life. Constable's mood and work varied, but he himself said it was

no surprise that he painted raging storms. And the painting that he thought would be considered

as greatest shows his old muse, Sol's Bicotheidal, almost enveloped by dark swirling clouds.

This time though it was politics, Constable the Conservative, was a gas to the ongoing debate

about the reform Bill of 1832, which expanded urban constituencies and reduced rural ones,

and Constable commented that this was an attack on the constitution of England, which would,

quote, only give the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people,

and so for Constable in effect England itself was under a cloud.

But the painting has a redemptive quality. The rainbow is a biblical symbol of God's peace with

mankind after the flood, and here after railing against the injustice of his wife's death,

Constable seems to be making his own peace with the world.

Constable's late work tends towards abstraction, and was highly influential. The French impressionist

for one picked up on the idea that landscape could be a vehicle for avant-garde experiment.

John Constable died on 31 March 1837, feeling that his work had not gained the recognition it deserved.

Ultimately he emerges as a paradoxical figure, a conservative man, but a radical artist,

whose work flew in the face of tradition, rather than reinforcing it.