This Day in Art History (John Constable, Masterful English Landscape Painter, Born)

June 11, 1776— John Constable, who labored for more than a quarter-century before the British art establishment and buyers recognized the uncommon sensitivity and beauty of his landscape paintings, was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, England.

The contrast with the other great English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner (only a year older), could hardly be starker:

* Constable, not elected to the Royal Academy till age 52, found considerable favor in his last decade; Turner, the youngest Academician when elected 25 years earlier, polarized the public with his late works.

*Constable was deeply devoted to his sickly wife Maria Bickness and their seven children; Turner was a perfectionist who often shunted aside those closest to him.

*Constable held traditional beliefs in the Anglican Church; Turner was a thoroughgoing iconoclast.

*Constable, according to art critic John Ruskin, was “an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature,” while this influential Victorian not only bought works from Turner but watched him create in his studio.

(To understand how Constable and Turner became bitter rivals—including a pivotal 1831 incident involving placement of their paintings in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition—see this fine 2018 blog post by art historian and an independent lecturer Cindy Polemis.)

For the longest time, though several documentaries were made about him, Constable didn’t possess the kind of cantankerous, eccentric personality that attracted feature film creators, as his contemporary and rival did when Mike Leigh made his 2014 biographical drama Mr. Turner. He still hasn’t had an extended cinema treatment.

But in 2024, “The Painters,” a segment of the regionally distributed movie Once Upon a Time in Suffolk, dealt with Constable’s friendship with John Dunthorne, with whom he competed to impress a young lady in need of a new portrait.

In one sense, the personalities of Constable and Turner were expressed through their subject matter. The turbulent Turner was fascinated by stormy weather, as in his 1824 watercolor Brighthelmston, Sussex. Constable looked to the tranquil, lush English countryside, reflecting his belief, as noted in Robert Cumming’s Art: A Visual History, that “nature, with its freshness, sunlight, trees, shadows, streams, and so forth, was full of moral and spiritual goodness.”

For a nation plunging in earnest into the Industrial Revolution, such Constable paintings as The Hay Wain and Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (1821), as well as The Leaping Horse (1825) depicted an exquisite but fragile natural landscape in danger of being lost.