An Expanding Vision: Constable and the Transformation of Landscape
October 22, 2006
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings
After the final lecture, the speakers will be joined by Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art, for a panel discussion.
Constable and the Big Picture
Ann Bermingham, professor, department of art history and archaeology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Rather than the culmination of Constable's "natural painture," the six-footers mark a radical departure from his earlier work. Until his exhibition of The White Horse at the Royal Academy in 1819, Constable's largest exhibition canvases had not measured over fifty-one inches in width. These paintings—Dedham Vale: Morning (1811) and Scene on a navigable river (1816)—appear to have given him no end of trouble; in the case of the first canvas, Constable reported to David Lucas that out of fear of failure he said his prayers before it every night.
Large canvases like the six-footers were out of character for Constable, who was a miniaturist by nature. His natural style of painting evolved from small pencil and oil sketches and small-scale canvases averaging no more than thirty inches wide. Anyone who has ever held his tiny 1813 and 1814 sketchbooks understands this and can only marvel at how the lilliputian world created by Constable on their 3 ½ by 4 ½ inch pages is miraculously observed in every detail. As Graham Reynolds noted many years ago, the early landscapes of Constable constitute "a map of his father's possessions." The works' small size and closely observed detail suggest an intimacy born of physical and imaginative possession. It is this sense of intimacy that is lost in the six-footers.
In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart explains, "We find the miniature at the origin of private individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history." This seems a good place to start in examining what is gained and lost for Constable in his struggle to shift to large-format canvases. It also encourages us to speculate on how it was that the inflation of the artist's personal vision of the Stour River valley came to stand for a national vision of a rural England composed not of great estates, but of small farms and gentlemanly manor houses. The six-footers invert what we normally expect of the grand landscape––that is, an idealized treatment of a notable view or historical action––and they substitute instead a naturalistic rendering of an undistinguished landscape meaningful only to the artist. For Constable, inflating the size of his canvases meant a gradual loss of visual connection to the place of his youth and the replacement of close naturalistic observation with a highly emotional and increasingly incoherent expressivity. His loss, however, was the viewer's gain in that it transformed place into spectacle and, in doing so, made the private and intimate nature of Constable's work widely accessible.
Great Expectations: Constable and the Sketch
Robyn Asleson, independent art historian
In his lifetime, Constable's reputation rose and fell by his publicly exhibited paintings. Since his death, interest has gravitated toward the cache of virtually unknown works left behind in his studio: the oil sketches through which he pursued his great ambitions for landscape painting. Not only are these sketches esteemed as vital preparatory aids and the catalysts for Constable's two greatest contributions to the history of landscape painting (the development of a "natural painture" and the creation of monumental six-foot landscapes), but they are also valued as works of art in themselves. In many instances, they are preferred to the more labored exhibition canvases.
This lecture responds to new evidence and ideas concerning Constable's sketching practice brought to light by the present exhibition. Particular attention is directed to full-size sketches associated with the six-footers and the various theories that have attempted to account for them. Seeking further insight into the artist's intentions, the lecture examines improvisational techniques developed by some of Constable's English contemporaries, who were struggling with analogous conceptual and material concerns. After briefly charting the reception of Constable's sketches among artists, critics, and collectors, the lecture considers the extent to which fascination with the oil sketches has shaped and even skewed our conception of the artist.
Constable to Delacroix: Was There a French Connection?
Patrick Noon, curator of paintings and modern sculpture, Minneapolis Institute of Art
During the 1820s at least twenty-two paintings by Constable were acquired by French collectors and dealers. Many of these works remained accessible to French painters for several decades. The most famous, The Hay Wain and View on the River Stour, were shown publicly at the legendary 1824 Paris exhibition of the works of living artists––or the "British Salon" as it subsequently became known, owing to the unprecedented appearance of British artists in this traditionally exclusive celebration of French talent. Although the paintings were subjected to tremendous invective, few on either side of the channel disputed the originality of the British school and the marked divergence of its aims from those of the more codified French approach to landscape painting.
French artists would become thoroughly versed in the styles of Britain's best landscape painters, either from firsthand examination of pictures exhibited in Paris, descriptions furnished by friends who had visited London, or the many engravings after Constable and others extensively circulated in France. One influential French painter, Paul Huet, bluntly conceded the impact of Constable on their earliest reflections: "In the history of modern painting, the appearance of Constable's work in 1824 was an event."
This paper will examine what constituted the "Constable event," and to what extent, and in what fashion, his landscape practice influenced the course of French painting through the nineteenth century.
Translations: The Artistic and Cultural Legacies of Constable's Six-Footers
Juilee Decker, assistant professor of art history, Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky
The natural geography and built environment of southeastern England inspired Constable to create poised drawings, luminous sketches, and outstanding paintings––including those that are the focus of the present exhibition. Because these works depict the "scenes of [his] boyhood" and sites that the artist visited, they may be categorized as personal, with their reference narrowly defined as Constable's life; however, shortly after the artist's death, the images became emblems of that which is characteristically "English." They seemed to transcend the personal to become widely appreciated––perhaps universal.
How have generations of artists and viewers understood Constable's paintings? What are we, as present viewers, to make of his large canvases? This talk will trace the artist's legacy, in both printed and painted form, as a means of articulating the development of Constable's posthumous identity. It will, moreover, explore the artistic and cultural appreciation of the large, finished paintings to show how Constable's landscapes and their translations have thus served as inspiration for generations of artists, collectors, and tourists from the artist's lifetime until the present day.