John Constable,  (1776-1837)

Constable was born on June 11, 1776, (one year after Turner) in East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a prosperous corn merchant with two water mills and 90 acres of land. After leaving Dedham Grammar School (now a private house), he worked in the family business but his real desire was to be an artist. In 1795 he met Sir George Beaumont an amateur painter, who showed him a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain, enticing Constable to study art and in 1799 his father allow him to attend the Royal Academy. He exhibited his first landscape paintings in 1802 after which he developing a distinctly individual style. In 1816, on the death of his father, Constable became financially secure and  married Maria Bicknell, whom he had courted for seven years and was the guiding passion in his life. The couple moved to Hampstead Heath, London, in 1821 and had seven children, five of whom became artists. Mary age 40 had developed TB and died, leaving Constable  broken hearted.

Turner and Constable were at the Academy School together but never became friends. Turner became rich and famous, Constable only sold 20 paintings in England in his lifetime and not until he was 39 years old, denied his accolade until the age of 52 - just eight years before his death.

1812-14 makes hundreds of sketches in Stour Valley Suffolk / Essex

1815 Exhibits Boat building at the RA

1823 Shows Salisbury Cathedral at RA, next year is awarded gold medal by King of France.

All that Constable hoped to achieve through his art is summed up in a revealing comment he made in David Lucas's English Landscape Scenery (in which some of Constable's designs had been converted into mezzotints): "to increase the interest for … and study of the Rural Scenery of England with all its endearing associations, its amenities, and even in its most simple locations; abounding as it does in grandeur, and every description of Pastoral Beauty."  

Salisbury Cathedral John Constable

The Royal Academy refused Constable full membership until 1829, his work received little recognition in England. In France, however, where his famous Haywain (exhibited RA 1821 see below) and later exhibited in the Salon, Paris in 1824, was much admired by the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, by the Barbizon painters, who, following Constable's example, began to paint outdoors, and by the Impressionists, who sought to capture the effects of light. He died in London, on March 31, 1837. 

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