National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

During his honeymoon in 1816 Constable painted a number of oil sketches of the Dorset coast, including two sketches of Bowleaze Cove in Weymouth Bay. He later worked up this exhibition picture based on one of those outdoor sketches (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). He showed the curve of the bay, with a cliff in the foreground and hills beyond, and depicted a dense mass of cloud over the sea nearing the coast. Passages of sunlight in the sky light up the hills and the bay. Some time between 1819 and 1830 Constable extended his original painting by adding strips of canvas at the top and left to give a greater expanse of sea and sky. It was this version of the oil painting that Lucas used as a basis for the mezzotint, Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire . In his biography of Constable, Andrew Shirley remarked: He recorded a dramatic moment at Weymouth … broken storm-clouds pass over an unquiet sea, where the earth’s safe helmet of grass ends abruptly at the bright cliffs. Years later, in a mezzotint, he

This portrait commemorates Constable’s friendship with Ramsay Richard Reinagle when they were students together at the Royal Academy, and Reinagle’s stay with Constable and his family at East Bergholt during the summer of 1799. It shows Constable very much as his first biographer, C.R. Leslie, described him, ‘the tall and well formed handsome miller, with a fresh complexion and fine dark eyes’ (Leslie (1843/45) 1951, p. 4).

While staying at Brighton Constable made a number of excursions along the coast, to places such as nearby Hove. Hove was less populated than Brighton, without the bustle of tourists, and gave Constable the opportunity to concentrate on the beach, sea and sky. In this painting, and Hove Beachc.1824 , Constable handled his paint expressively and used the figures on the beach, the buildings and boats to provide a contrast to the natural elements. There are numerous pentimenti, which indicate that Constable altered the position of the boats on the skyline.

Throughout his working life Constable copied the work of other artists, doing so both as quick sketches and in facsimile. He copied artists as diverse as Cozens, Cuyp, Reynolds, Rubens, Titian, Willem van de Velde the younger and Richard Wilson. But the artists he copied most frequently were Claude Lorrain and the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–1682). In this drawing, which is an almost exact copy of Ruisdael’s etching The wheatfield 1648, Constable showed his understanding of Ruisdael’s technique and vision. He reproduced details of the etching such as the uppermost twigs of the front tree. He also faithfully imitated Ruisdael’s signature and feigned the plate mark, which led Ian Fleming-Williams to suggest that Constable, rather than just showing off his technical ability, may also have been making ‘an elaborate leg-pull’ (Fleming-Williams 1976, p. 64). Constable frequently mentioned Ruisdael in correspondence with his friend John Fisher; on 28 November 1826 he wrote

Constable lovingly depicted the garden and fields behind his family home, a place he described to Maria Bicknell as ‘the sweet feilds where we have passed so many happy hours together’ (Beckett II, p. 78). He drew the scene from above, from a first floor window at the back of the house, enlivened by the activity taking place. In the foreground he showed the flower garden that he associated with his mother and the adjacent kitchen garden that he connected with his father. He included the figure of a woman (perhaps his mother) in the flower garden and two gardeners tending the rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden. He depicted a cowherd and cattle beside his father’s barn on the left, and on the extreme right he showed the East Bergholt rectory where Maria stayed at times during their courtship. The mill where he had once worked is shown on the horizon in the centre. Constable’s pride in his family’s successful and well-organised farm is evident. He depicted an ordered and harmonious landscape, and becaus

Constable painted this fourth version of The Glebe Farm more freely than any of the other three versions. Using both palette knife and brush, he gave this painting a warm tonality, with flickering highlights. He included a spire in the upper right, rather than the square tower of Langham Church of the other three images – although the spire sits on a Langham Church-style square tower. He first introduced a windmill in place of the tower, and traces of its sails are still visible beneath the spire. Reynolds has suggested that Constable is likely to have painted this work in the autumn of 1830. The glebe was traditionally land farmed to support the living of the church, but the farm in this picture was not in fact on glebe land. Michael Rosenthal has noted that in depicting a cottage landscape in a woodland Constable was working in the Picturesque tradition of Hobbema and Gainsborough (Rosenthal 1983, p. 180). He was moreover painting a ‘landscape of memory’ – the rural world he depicted had since changed as

This impressive painting is beautifully painted with jewel-like precision and shows Constable’s ability to capture the immediate sensations of light and atmosphere; it is one of Constable’s most natural depictions of the landscape around his home, reflecting his interest in portraying rural harmony. It is notable in the way the figures are more conspicuous and more particularised than in his other early landscapes. Although based on a number of sketchbook drawings, the work was probably painted in large part in front of the motif. The field depicted here is the same one seen in the right foreground of the The Stour Valley and Dedham Village 5 September 1814 . Constable depicted a traditional farming community harvesting wheat, with harvesters, gleaners, a boy with a dog and a distant ploughman. The woman and two girls in the foreground are poor, gleaning the ears of wheat missed by the reapers. The boy with the dog is guarding the workers’ food and drink, draped in discarded clothes to provide shade from

Constable painted several oil sketches of the view towardsEast Bergholt rectory, showing the fields where he walked with his beloved Maria Bicknell. He painted this lively impression of the rising sun glowing over and through the fields from an upper floor window at the back of his family home. His response to the scene is expressed through energetic brushstrokes and the use of intense reds and greens – the expanded chromatic range that Constable was using in his oil sketches at this time (Rosenthal 1983, p. 45). Constable’s description of East Bergholt appeared in the letterpress to the second edition of Lucas–Constable mezzotints, English Landscape: East Bergholt, or as its Saxon derivation implies, ‘Wooded Hill’, is thus mentioned in ‘The Beauties of England and Wales’ … It is pleasantly situated in the most cultivated part of Suffolk, on a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which river divides that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, the gentle de