Constable: A Country Rebel

'In August 1824, the Salon des Beaux-Arts,

'the most important exhibition in the French artistic calendar,

'opened at the Louvre in Paris.

'That year, one painting in particular was causing a sensation.

'A critic described it as simply water,

'air and sky, and felt there were few masterpieces,

'ancient or modern, that could stand in opposition to it.

'The French writer Stendhal called it the mirror of nature.

'Both its subject matter and the way it was painted were in stark

'contrast to the highly polished scenes of classical subjects

'that were still admired in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era.

'The picture was Landscape: Noon by John Constable.

'Better known to us today as 'The Hay Wain'.

'For many people it is the supreme depiction of the English

'rural landscape.

'So why did it appeal so profoundly to the French?'

Upon seeing the painting, the young romantic artist

Eugene Delacroix supposedly feverishly retouched sections

of this picture in the hours before the salon opened because he was

so energised and so excited by the techniques that he'd seen.

Delacroix acknowledged his debt to what he called the "vigorous

"and unexpected landscapes" of this remarkable English painter.

He described the first Constable sketch he saw as an amazing

and incredible thing.

The French were utterly beguiled by The Hay Wain.

So much so that it won a gold medal

and was generally considered a revolutionary picture.

And of course,

the French - well, they knew a thing or two about revolutions.

Unfortunately, the admiration was not mutual.

John Constable, the harassable and curmudgeonly painter

of the sweetest visions of rural England

had rebelled against his father,

his tutors, the art establishment and the traditional understanding

of art history that regarded his landscapes with derision.

He rejected the praise of the French critics just as emphatically.

Constable went out of his way to frustrate his French admirers.

He said that he hoped he'd never have to go to

Paris as long as he lived, even when he was invited to

receive his medal from the King of France, Charles X.

And his attitude seems all the more contrary

when you consider that back across the Channel, in his own country,

he struggled as an artist both critically and financially.

And no-one much cared for his work.

Now, I should confess something.

For me it's much easier to understand the English attitude

rather than the French one.

I find it really difficult to think of John Constable

as a revolutionary painter.

He's somehow so safe and comfortable and cosy and nostalgic

and so English.

I'm so familiar with this picture that

I just can't really get excited about it.

It seems to say, "No sex, please, we're British".

But maybe I'm guilty of artistic snobbery -

after all it isn't Constable's fault that he's so popular

with people who sell tea towels and jigsaws.

Constable was a revolutionary figure

but he thought of himself really as a truth teller.

As a painter who painted the rural world of England as it really was.

Nineteenth century landscape painting is

a place for revolution and Constable certainly was

a cornerstone of the landscape revolution.

We've fallen in love with Constable

because he presents something of an ideal of what it is to be English.

Something that we think that we know, but he was saying

something at the time that was new and breaking new ground.

It was only really in the time of the Impressionists that

Constable was acknowledged as one of the founders of modern art.

I'm not convinced.

I think of Constable as someone quite conservative,

both in his life and in his art.

There's no question that he's embedded deep in the English psyche,

but is he also a revolutionary painter?

"East Bergholt is pleasantly situated in the most

"cultivated part of Suffolk, on a spot

"which overlooks the valley of the River Stour.

"The beauty of the surrounding scenery,

"its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats

"sprinkled with flocks and herds, its woods and rivers with numerous

"scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages,

"all impart to this particular spot an amenity, an elegance,

"hardly anywhere else to be found."

That's Constable's own description of the scenes of his boyhood,

which he was fond of saying made him a painter.

This is the classic biography of Constable and it's

written by his friend, Charles Robert Leslie, who was a painter.

And, its strength is that it draws very heavily upon Constable's

own correspondence.

You get a really intimate sense of Constable the man,

but, at the same time, because it was written by a friend,

it goes quite easily on Constable.

Still, for all of that, it's not a bad place to begin.

Constable said painting was but another word for feeling,

and it's absolutely clear that he adored this landscape.

It would remain the most significant source of his subject matter

throughout his life, whether he was here to paint it or not.

He understood this landscape.

One of his brothers said that,

"I know when John paints a windmill the sails will go around."

So he felt that because he knew the landscape and what was

going on intimately well, he could paint it with a special authority.

The fact that this part of the world is known as "Constable country"

is something that Constable himself encouraged during his own lifetime.

He once wrote proudly to a friend that

when travelling home to Suffolk by coach,

he remarked upon the general beauty of the scene to a fellow passenger.

"Yes, sir, this is Constable's country" the gentleman said.

At which point Constable immediately added,

"I then told him who I was, lest he should spoil it."

But, in one sense, this was already Constable country

when he walked it as a young boy,

because his father owned great swathes of the surrounding farmland.

Flatford Mill, which Golding Constable unexpectedly inherited,

was the basis of his fortune.

But he'd expanded his business rapidly,

acquiring another mill at Dedham and a couple of windmills too.

He ran a fleet of barges supplying flour to markets in London.

As a consequence, he was able to build himself a very large

residence in the middle of the village of East Bergholt,

where two years later, in 1776, John Constable was born.

The house is gone now, but we know what it looked like

because John painted and drew it so often.

The society into which he was born was changing turbulently -

revolution was in the air.

He was born in the year of the American Revolution,

and the Industrial Revolution was powering a period of rapid

urban expansion, causing frequent unrest in the countryside

where the traditional way of life seemed under threat.

When he was 13 in 1789, the French Revolution took place,

and by the time of his 17th birthday we were at war with France.

The background static of revolution was also reflected

in the painting of the period.

Heroic depictions of historical scenes and powerful images

of new industrial processes were all the rage.

But none of this seemed to interest the young John Constable.

What he loved, he said, were willows, old rotten planks,

slimy posts and brickwork.

"I should paint my own places best," he wrote,

and for the first part of his career, he painted little else.

But if the places of his boyhood made him a painter,

it seems they also made him a Tory.

Constable's father was a very successful entrepreneur -

locally they would have been regarded as gentlemen.

He was very much a member of the ruling class of the rural world.

By our standards, he would certainly have been a traditional Tory.

But though Constable shared his father's political views, he was no

entrepreneur, and wasn't interested in learning the family trade.

Instead, for no easily discernible reason,

he decided that he wanted to become a painter.

Paradoxically, in order to achieve his goal,

he faced the prospect of leaving the very source of his inspiration

to go and study in London.

The trigger for that change was an introduction into the home

of a local baronet called Sir George Beaumont and there, for the

first time, Constable encountered some serious works of art.

And this was one of them, Hagar And The Angel by the French

landscape painter, Claude Lorrain, now hanging in the National Gallery.

Sir George had a very impressive collection of old master paintings,

but this picture here was his favourite.

So much so that he had a special case constructed

so that he could transport it in his coat wherever he went.

It was the first great old master that Constable saw one-to-one

and was actually able to handle, and it was a painting that was

a fixed point of reference for him throughout his working life.

Landscape was not regarded as a serious subject

for a painter at the time - it had to be smuggled into a painting

like this, almost in disguise.

The addition in the lower foreground of figures from classical

mythology or a scene from the Bible gave the picture moral purpose.

But even when he painted this, in 1646,

Claude recognised the imposture.

"I paint the landscape," he said, "the figures are gratis".

After meeting Sir George and seeing his art,

Constable's mind was made up.

In 1799, 23-years-old and burning with ambition,

he left Suffolk.

This rural stretch of the Stour Valley, which he

was to make famous and which would ultimately bear his name,

was never again his permanent home.

On the fourth of March, he wrote in a letter,

"I am this morning admitted as student at The Royal Academy."

There was no more prestigious place for an artist to study,

but as the embodiment of the British art establishment,

the Royal Academy of Arts could also open doors for painters

who conformed to its standards.

As a 23-year-old when he enrolled, Constable was a very mature student,

and it's here that he crosses paths for the first time with his nemesis.

His almost exact contemporary, Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Turner, the son of a London barber from Covent Garden,

had joined the academy at the age of 14, and in the same year

that Constable arrived as a student was already an associate member.

But Constable's late enrolment at the Academy wasn't

the greatest obstacle to his career.

The Royal Academy had been set up 30 years earlier to raise

the bar of British art under the leadership of Sir Joshua Reynolds,

whose discourses were the foundation of his teachings.

And though Constable, when he turned up, he did all of the right things -

he was drawing classical statuary, he was copying old masters -

the rules laid down here proved to be his undoing

in the short term of his immediate career prospects.

But I think, in a sense,

they were also the making of him as an artist rebel.

At this time, paintings were ordered according to their subject matter.

At the top of the hierarchy were historical subjects,

which demanded vision and imagination from the painter.

Then came portraiture, which required a high standard

of skill and insight to reveal the true likeness of the sitter.

Beneath these disciplines came what were known as genre paintings,

showing scenes of everyday life,

and descending right down to the very bottom of the pile came

pictures in which there was no human involvement -

still life and landscape.

But from the very start, Constable didn't seem inclined to

play along with these rules.

Of course, Constable wasn't the first painter of landscapes

to feel quite resentful about this state of affairs, but

if there's one thing I can see about him that's clearly revolutionary,

it's that he managed to break free from this artistic straitjacket.

The thing is, to get to that point,

he was setting off on a very rocky road indeed.

The year he left the Royal Academy there are estimated to have

been 2,500 professional painters working in London.

He'd chosen to work in the very lowest genre of art, and to add

to his challenge he refused to adapt his style to suit prevailing tastes.

The landscapes of old master painters that were cherished

at the time were usually discoloured by varnish that

had gone brown with age.

Discolour was much admired by connoisseurs, the sheer

naturalistic clarity of Constable's paintings seemed shockingly garish.

There's an amusing anecdote in Leslie and it gives us

an insight into the relationship between Sir George and Constable

because Sir George liked to pontificate about art to Constable,

and there was one occasion where he recommended that the prevailing

tone of everything should be the colour of an old Cremona fiddle.

Constable is having none of it - he fetches a fiddle

and places it on Sir George's lawn to demonstrate

conclusively that the grass was not the same colour as the fiddle.

The concept of honesty in his paintings

became something of an obsession for Constable.

At a time when everyone else, even Turner,

was doing what they felt the Academy demanded,

his vibrant colour palette represented a rebellious stance.

In 1802, as Constable left the Academy, Turner was elevated

to full membership and became a Royal Academician,

something that must have seemed almost unattainable to Constable.

Disillusioned by the work shown at the Summer Exhibition,

he tried to formulate a plan to put his own ideas into practice,

and in a passionate letter to an old friend in East Bergholt,

he set out the Constablist Manifesto.

He knows what he has to do now.

He spent three years at the Royal Academy, he's had

a look around the Royal Academy show and he's analysed what he thinks

is wrong with the London art world, which is what he calls mannerism.

It's running after pictures,

it's making paintings that look like paintings that already exist.

And the correction for that, he says,

as for everything else that's wrong with painting, is to go back

to nature, and that's what he intends to do now.

Painters had often made preparatory sketches outdoors to help them

complete their finished works later in the studio.

But these were usually done in media like pencil, pen or watercolour,

which were easy to transport and clean up afterwards.

Painting outdoor sketches in oil was another matter.

It had enjoyed sporadic popularity in the years before Constable,

but he not only took on the technical challenges but also became

supremely accomplished at overcoming the difficulties it presented.

Well, you've picked quite a good vista, you've got, what are these?

These are two beautiful willow trees.

Yeah. Constable would have loved to have painted these actually.

I think the way that they're turning slightly inside out,

so, you've got the opaque flat white

and then you've got the rich interior wood.

Julian has been a fan of Constable's oil sketches since he first saw them

as a student, and has been following the practice himself ever since.

I think the value in Constable's sketches is that he's

sort of channelling the adversity, as it were.

It's like a kind of high wire act in a way,

if it goes wrong you sink into mud, literally, you know,

the painting just disappears into a horrible sort of a daub.

But if you get it right, and he often did get it right,

the paintings have a vitality

and a freshness which is the quality that has basically travelled

through time since they were done and that we enjoy now.

Oil painting is quite technical and it's messy.

The big challenge is honing the kit right down

so that it's actually portable.

I mean, you've got your Everyday Value chopped tomatoes can.

I don't think John Constable had one of those,

but would he have had a box like this?

He certainly would've painted on the lid of his painting box,

which is a very efficient way of combining easel and paint box.

He didn't have, as I understand it though, tubes of paint, did he?

No, as I understand it he bought his paint in bladders, pigs bladders.

And then you imagine him what?

Sort of, with a pin prick into the bladder,

-you could squeeze a bit of the paint out?

-Yes.

Much like using...

Onto a palette that I should imagine would be sitting here,

and the paint stored underneath or chucked all around.

But for him, painting was quite a dynamic thing.

While Julian gets started on his sketch,

let's have a look at some of Constable's work.

The Victoria And Albert Museum recognises the importance

of these pictures with a whole wonder wall devoted to them.

I really find these oil sketches a total revelation,

they're done with such speed, with such spontaneity.

There's a clear delight that Constable

is taking in what he sees around him.

And in all of it, you get that sense of freshness

and sparkle of nature, which Constable wanted.

And that looseness,

that sense of intimacy with him, as an artist, makes them so beguiling.

I mean, here you can see all of these clouds, which you

sense them sort of forming and rushing off before your eyes.

Dramatic light peeping through trees, a sense of storminess.

They feel like they could've been

painted by some of the Impressionists.

Constable was at the cutting edge in that sense - he was doing

something which avant-garde artists later in the 19th century

were going to do, kind of, 50 years ahead of his time.

And I didn't really know about that, so to encounter this and see

not that slightly more formal Academy vision, but him inhabiting

the spirit of the landscape, has actually really been quite special.

What is it about his paintings that you admire?

They're just so brilliantly implicit.

He's constantly animating the surface.

There are constantly these little flecks, these strange highlights.

His paintings are like accumulations of marks.

They're not brushed out quite in the usual way that you

think of a painting.

It's ironic that he put so much effort into the bigger ones

and they have great strengths, but for me,

if I was nicking one painting, it would be a little sketch on paper.

Do you want to be inspired by some Constable quotations?

Well, I think I might be intimidated... Go on.

The world is wide. No two days are alike, nor even two hours.

Neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike

since the creation of the world.

HE LAUGHS

Well, that's like a charter for exactly how difficult painting is.

That's where Constable is a modernist, because he's developing

a new language to painting that isn't routed in Italy,

and it isn't routed in neo-classicism,

it's routed in the fields of Suffolk.

In the plein air painting,

where he had to paint really quickly

and he had to get the kind of vitality.

And that's what I think is really exciting about the sketches,

is that he created a language which has

passed on through his career, into his larger paintings

and into the careers of many other artists thereafter.

The decade after he left the Academy was a challenging

time for Constable.

He occasionally made modest sums from commissions,

but not really enough to live on.

He survived instead on an allowance from his father.

He was as dedicated as ever to refining his techniques but,

judged by the standards of the day,

his pictures seemed unfinished or worse.

He was accused of being lazy or clumsy,

and buyers were few and far between.

At this point, we need to leave Constable's artistic struggles

for a moment, and examine his personal struggles -

with which they have more than a little in common.

100 yards down the road from the Constables' new mansion was

the picturesque church of East Bergholt.

In the rigidly stratified society of a rural Georgian parish,

the country parson was a very important person,

whose opinions, as Constable was to discover, carried some weight.

The rector of this very pretty church was a formidable,

forbidding figure known as the Reverend Dr Durand Rhudde.

And here on the wall, you've got pretty much his entire CV.

He was one of His Majesty's chaplains,

formerly of King's College Cambridge.

He was rector of this parish

and he is a centrally important figure in the story of Constable's

life because he had a granddaughter, and her name was Maria Bicknell.

And in 1805 Constable fell profoundly,

head over heels in love with Maria -

when he was 33 and she was just 21,

and Dr Rhudde wasn't very happy about it.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Well, Dr Rhudde, he had several objections to the match,

not least of which was the fact that Constable lacked any real prospect

of earning enough to support a family.

In addition, however wealthy the Constable family were,

the Reverend Dr would certainly have regarded them

as social inferiors on account of their being in trade.

And in this case, quite rough trade.

Constable had a bit of a reputation

in the village as the handsome miller.

Constable painted many versions of this picture -

the view from an upstairs window in East Bergholt House,

possibly that from his own bedroom.

The house in the distance across the fields is the rectory,

where Maria stayed when visiting her grandfather.

The space between them is heavy with symbolic longing -

there's something visible, but just out of reach.

The ensuing seven years saw a titanic tussle

between the irascible rector who threatened to cut Maria out

of his will and not inconsiderable inheritance,

and the two star-crossed lovers

The plot could have been lifted

straight from the pages of a contemporary novel by Jane Austen.

But fear not, gentle viewer, she married him.

In 1816 to be exact, and still against the wishes of her family.

In the single-minded John Constable,

the redoubtable Dr Rhudde had found his match.

Constable's great friend, the Reverend John Fisher,

officiated at the ceremony.

The Fishers had also just got hitched, and the newlyweds

spent their honeymoon at his parish in Osmington on the Dorset coast.

It sounds like a blast.

They went for walks together and Constable sketched.

In the evenings, they sat by the fire

while Fisher read aloud to them from volumes of sermons.

But when the honeymoon was over, his prospects were bleak.

His father died that same year

and Constable inherited a share of the profits in the family business,

which was now run by his younger brother.

But the returns were meagre.

As a direct consequence of the victory at Waterloo

the previous year, the markets of Europe were suddenly opened

and the price of wheat tumbled.

Rural areas were hit extremely hard.

He was 40 years old, and his ceaseless campaigning

for recognition at the Academy had got him nowhere.

He needed to find some way to attract attention

in the crowded rooms of the summer exhibition.

And in 1818, he made a surprising breakthrough.

His idea was so simple it was almost absurd.

But like many simple ideas it proved to be very effective.

Every year, the successful candidates at the elections

tended to be the painters of big historical subjects -

the kinds of paintings that Constable

himself was quite sniffy about.

And because they were truly complicated pictures,

they tended to be really big. Some of them could be enormous.

By contrast, Constable's paintings were much smaller,

there wasn't that much dramatic about them.

But of course that was part of their appeal.

In 1819, he dramatically increased the size of his canvas,

and exhibited The White Horse -

an everyday scene of a barge horse being ferried across the river here.

The canvas was six feet wide, and on this scale, Constable's fresh paint,

his bright colours, they really leapt out at the viewer.

They really must have been quite startling, mesmerising,

because the tranquil beauty of the countryside round here was

augmented somehow, it was given added punch.

It really worked.

Explicitly, it ticked two very important boxes.

A newspaper critic compared him to Turner for the first time,

and the following November,

he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy.

The gestation of The White Horse wasn't without its problems,

because around about this time Dr Rhudde was so furious with

his grandson-in-law that Constable actually felt that he couldn't visit

East Bergholt, and that meant he wasn't able to paint the picture

on location, which had now become his usual working method.

So he had to kind of knock it up using sketches back in London.

And in order to test his composition,

as well as examine the way light and shade fell across the canvas,

he created a full-size preliminary sketch and that was revolutionary.

The full size sketch is something that's

pretty much unique to Constable - no other painter is doing this.

And one of the qualities that he's really interested in,

is that looser, more sketchy brushwork

that he's developed in his oil sketching out in the countryside,

and how do you get that freshness into a carefully designed

and consciously-planned six-foot painting?

And one of the ways he uses the six-foot studies is to be able to

experiment with how you might paint a tree more loosely

and incorporate that into the finished painting.

In the years that followed, Constable built upon

the experience that he gained from The White Horse, and within just a

couple of hundred yards of towpath, along this bend in the river,

he created a series of six footers

that are now considered his principal achievement,

and the greatest of them all he called Landscape: Noon.

This is arguably the most famous view in Britain.

And the painting, at least, is so famous that it has a curious effect.

It makes this scene in front of me now, even though I'm here,

feel paradoxically quite unreal.

I think part of the reason for that is there obviously a desire

culturally, on behalf of all of us,

to preserve this spot as somewhere you can go and see,

as though that channels Constable's inspiration somehow.

And in doing that, the place has been slightly prettified.

Willy Lott's cottage is in much better nick now than it ever was

when he was living there.

The trees are clearly very managed,

and in a sense that deviates, for me,

from the real spirit of Constable, because he said he was really

interested in rotten banks and

willows and slimy posts and brickwork.

And here, I have to say this morning, it's a beautiful day,

but there's a distinct absence of slime.

For Constable, the process of

translating this landscape from slimy reality

to finished picture involved his now-established procedure of

preparing a full-size, six-foot study or sketch of the view.

I think the trouble with The Hay Wain is that is feels

impossible to look at it and not see some sort of visual cliche.

One answer is to come and look at this, because what he's doing

is taking everything that he'd honed and learned and experimented with

when he was making much smaller oil sketches.

But here is really writ large, I mean this is colossal.

And it feels so strikingly modern. There are bits over here

that look like modern, almost abstract, art.

He's delighting in the simple act of putting paint on canvas.

So down here, he's painted this dog very rapidly, with great economy,

just a few strokes,

including this delightful white splodge of paint on his back.

I just find that delicious, it's good enough to eat, that.

This is what he's doing in his own private studio.

And then in the finished picture,

he's creating something suitable for the Academy.

It's funny, for me, seeing this painting is completely transformed

now that I've actually been to the spot and seen the full-size sketch.

Even Constable himself was surprised when he created The Hay Wain.

He said it had a much more novel look than he had expected.

And I guess that's because it

retains such a sense of the freshness of the sketch.

The sense of sparkling sunlight that suffuses the whole thing -

you can see it in these white highlights

that are scattered across the foreground.

Seeing the tweaks that Constable has made along the way,

has made me realise that this isn't

a sort of painting equivalent of a photograph.

We know that this is a piece of artifice

because there is a great story about the fact that Constable's

father's bargeman, when he saw the picture,

he objected to the way the Constable painted the horses, because he said

that the horses in reality would never have had those trappings.

This is a landscape remembered from childhood by a 45-year-old man.

It was already a nostalgic vision of a vanishing way of life

when it was painted.

Constable's world is a pre-industrial paradise,

everything is done by hand -

the ploughing, the harvesting, the opening and closing of the

locked gates - powered machinery is nowhere to be seen.

But this was a world that was already falling apart.

The price of grain was tumbling,

pushing the advance of rural mechanisation,

and farm labourers were moving to

the cities to work in the mills and factories.

The prison population in Norwich had doubled in the previous five years,

since the end of The Napoleonic Wars.

250,000 ex-soldiers had flooded the countryside,

and as a result, labourer's wages were dramatically reduced.

So there was a real sense of unease and trouble across England,

but you'd never know it looking at The Hay Wain.

There's something else about the picture that is entirely new -

the sky is real.

Though Constable looked to the past for inspiration,

he was very happy to explore the latest advances of science

if it would help him in his quest to paint the truth of nature.

"We see nothing until we understand it" he said, and he wanted to

understand the weather, to depict it accurately in his paintings.

Around the time he began work on The Hay Wain,

he started to sketch the sky as a subject in its own right.

At the same time, Constable moved his family out of central London to

live in Hampstead, then a rural village north of the city.

Maria was showing the first serious symptoms of tuberculosis,

and it was hoped the clean air up here on the edge of the heath

would be beneficial to her health.

It was also the perfect place to indulge his new passion for the sky.

-You must be John?

-That's right - nice to meet you, Alastair.

Yeah, great to meet you too.

Well, I can see this must be the spot because there's the plaque.

I can only apologise about the weather -

I was hoping to spot some clouds with you today.

Oh, not to worry, because Constable

would have loved this type of weather. He was a real meteorologist.

He would look forward to how the weather would develop

during the day, and he deliberately moved here because he knew this was

close to his favourite spot, which is the view across Branch Hill Pond.

-I feel like we should see it, can we go there?

-Definitely, yes.

Lead the way then. Which way are we off to? Lovely.

I'm a professor of meteorology,

so I suppose I have looked at the skies all my life.

Constable's skies are probably the closest an artist has

ever managed to get to the real thing.

So it's just down here, is it?

Yes, so this is the most-favoured view of Constable,

from more or less this spot.

Around about 1820, he started to paint some of his six-foot canvases

and was struggling really with the size of the sky.

He decided, almost like a scientist,

to do a series of observational experiments,

to actually paint the sky,

and he did almost 100 images of just the sky.

-100?

-Yeah.

The great meteorologist at the time was called Luke Howard,

and he developed the Latin names that we use for clouds that we use today

like cirrus and cumulus et cetera,

and he kept very detailed weather observations.

And there's a very good correlation between Constable's weather notes

on his paintings and Luke Howard's weather observations.

He mixed in, not just artistic circles,

he mixed in scientific circles within Hampstead.

Turner produced some fantastic skies,

but they were purely from his visual memory

whereas Constable was much more aware of the fact that to get

the sky correct in a landscape, you have to understand how

things like rainbows and clouds are formed.

When the summer exhibition of 1821 came to a close,

The Hay Wain returned to Constable's painting studio unsold,

and in that autumn, in the next round of Royal Academy elections,

he was unsuccessful again.

So the six-footers, they had won him some recognition,

they had got him an associateship.

But now he needed another big idea.

His friend, now Archdeacon John Fisher, made the shocking suggestion

that Constable might paint something other than the Stour Valley.

"One cannot survive on a diet solely of mutton," says Fisher.

"People are tired of mutton on top, mutton at bottom,

"mutton at the side dishes, though of the best flavour."

Fisher's uncle was the Bishop of Salisbury, and he wanted

a painting of his cathedral to display in his London drawing room.

The Bishop invited Constable to make the picture,

and it was a really welcome commission for him,

not only because it provided him with much-needed cash,

but also because it allowed him to broaden out his subject matter.

Although there are elements

of meadows and river that we

know from the Suffolk pictures,

the cathedral itself is something

new for Constable

and he found it quite challenging.

In his own opinion, he believed that he had pulled it off.

He told Fisher afterwards,

"It was the most difficult subject I have ever had upon my easel.

"I have not flinched at the work

"of the windows, buttresses, et cetera, et cetera,

"but I have, as usual,

"made my escape in the evanescence of the chiaroscuro."

Constable's religious faith was a comfortable fit

with his political beliefs.

He was staunchly Anglican,

and certainly regarded the church as the Tory Party at prayer.

It's easy to read in the painting

his admiration for Salisbury

and the religion it represented.

In the lower left he paints the bishop himself,

gesturing proprietarily to the cathedral with his family.

It looks different now, but I think it was different then.

I don't think the trees existed like that.

It's a painter's device for showing something off.

The natural arches seem to echo the gothic arches, just like

the interior of the cathedral really.

And I think it's that echo of inside and out,

nature and architectural form that Constable's playing with.

Do we know what the bishop made of the finished painting?

I don't think he liked the sky.

I think he thought it was rather dark and lowering.

I think there's always a bit of a dark sky over

the Church Of England, and society was pretty tricky in the 1820s.

Out of The Napoleonic Wars, not feeling quite stable,

would there be a revolution in

England as there was on the Continent?

All of those things were around but there were issues in church as well -

Catholic emancipation, and indeed

the style in which clergy lived in smart places like Salisbury.

And we're not far off Trollope and The Barchester Chronicles

and the sense of how this isn't sustainable as a pattern of living.

Constable, who was very fond of staying in the cathedral close,

was extremely scornful of these modish ideas.

So it's no wonder he felt that a gloomy sky was appropriate.

The really wonderful thing about having

the Bishop Of Salisbury as your patron is that

because he was a Prince of the Church,

the picture would hang in his

opulent London residence where it could be seen,

and possibly even admired, by all sorts important, influential people.

And yet Constable, despite this guilt-edged opportunity,

he didn't hand over the finished picture for three years,

and only then, he did it grudgingly.

Still, by the time that it was completed,

he'd found a really new subject to paint.

MUSIC: "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside"

Before they were married,

Maria Constable had gone on holiday to Brighton and she loved it.

She wrote to tell Constable what fun it was.

"I was never at a bathing town," he wrote back rather caustically,

"But I am told they are amusing."

By now, Maria was in very poor health, and not as amused

by the town as she might once have been.

But the family's increasingly urgent pursuit

of fresh air saw them relocate here in 1824.

I think it's a measure of just how much Constable loved Maria,

or his darling little fish, as he called her,

that he even contemplated coming to Brighton.

At the time, the town was at its peak of popularity -

the King, George IV was in residence at the Royal Pavilion.

But Constable didn't care for that at all.

This is his, superb, I think, description from the first summer

that he was in Brighton, and it's in a letter to his friend John Fisher.

He says, "Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion

"and offscouring of London.

"The magnificence of the sea is drowned in the din

"and tumult of stagecoaches, gigs, flies, et cetera,

"and the beach is only Piccadilly by the seaside.

"Ladies dressed and undressed - gentlemen in morning gowns

"and slippers, or without them or anything else,

"about knee-deep in the breakers.

"Footmen, children, nursery-maids, dogs, boys, fishermen -

"all mixed together in endless and indecent confusion."

It's a great passage, sort of proto-Dickensian.

It's almost like Constable, despite himself, was energised by the place.

Fisher replied that this passage was worthy of publication

in John Bull magazine,

a trenchantly Tory satirical rag they both subscribed to.

"Brighton is an odious place," he agreed.

Not surprisingly, the house Constable found for the family was

far away from the busy haunts of the "offscourings" on Marine Parade.

Number 9 Mrs Sober's Gardens was then on the

western edge of the town, and across

the road was Mrs Sober's vegetable patch, and beyond, the open fields.

In a strange twist of fate, the room in which Constable painted is

now once more a studio.

This is the space that he used as a painting room,

He shared it with the cook, and his wife redecorated it for him.

We've got that in his letters.

We moved into this space without knowing that it was

Constable's house.

This is what he would have looked out to.

That was a two-hour sketch,

and it was the view out of his studio window.

How do you feel about the whole

Brighton chapter in Constable's story?

The way that he's painting is much freer, much more adventurous.

Brighton just opens him up and he's on an absolute high -

he's painting like a demon, he's absolutely on fire,

sort of producing a painting every two hours.

There's 150 paintings that went on in this house over four years.

I often wake up each morning thinking,

"How on earth did he manage to produce so much work?" It's insane.

In May 1824, at the same time as the Constables were

unpacking their bags at 9 Mrs Sober's Gardens,

The Hay Wain was being unpacked by its new owner.

After much haggling,

and with the addition of other minor pieces to gild the deal,

Constable had received £250 for the painting.

The man who worked so hard negotiating

to secure his purchases had a very English name,

he was called John Arrowsmith, but in reality he was a Frenchman.

Oh, dear.

When John Arrowsmith bought The Hay Wain,

he wasn't some oddball French Anglophile -

he was surfing a cultural wave that had been building in strength

ever since the Battle of Waterloo.

This corner of the Boulevard des Italiens became

the centre of the British community in Paris at the time.

There was a cross-channel exchange in the aftermath of nearly

25 years of war, and it saw a flood of Brits arriving here in Paris.

And the French, well, they found the strange fashions the

Brits were wearing completely hilarious, but in time, they also

realised that there was quite a bit to admire about British culture.

The works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron

were widely read and admired.

The theatres were full of Shakespeare

and other British plays and,

most surprisingly, British art became popular.

That year, the salon

here at The Louvre was known as "The British Salon."

"They seem to think we can paint a little,"

William Etty wrote rather drily to Thomas Lawrence,

who was the President then of the Royal Academy.

But the general popularity of British art is only a small

part of the admiration of French painters for Constable's work.

And he explains what the French painters

liked about his own paintings.

He said, "They're struck with their vivacity and freshness,

"things unknown to their own pictures.

"The truth is they study pictures only, they know as little

"of nature as a Hackney coach horse does of a pasture."

The supremely polished and finished pictures of artists

from the Napoleonic era like Jacques-Louis David

and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres were still popular in Paris.

The Hay Wain seemed like the freshest breath of

meadow-scented air, blowing across the Channel.

But it was Constable's Anglophile fan boy, the young painter

Eugene Delacroix, who was the most excited by the picture.

After the end of the Empire,

the immigrants who spent the French Revolution in Britain came

back speaking English, for instance, and adding British Culture.

-And still...

-Did that become fashionable suddenly?

Yes, of course, it was very fashionable.

Even the word fashionable became part of the French language.

All the way of acting, the way of behaving,

the way of being dressed also came from England at that bit of time.

To exhibit British paintings was a very new thing.

-And did they cause a sensation?

-Yes. Major sensation.

With the Constable paintings, it was a kind of revolution.

All generations say,

"It's not painting

"because I have not to see the trace of the brush."

In Constable paintings, of course you see the traces of the brush.

And it's the same in Delacroix's paintings,

so he was very much impressed, as all of the Romantics' generation.

The French enthusiasm for Constable's pictures seems

to me to be a genuinely unprejudiced response to the way he painted -

they knew nothing of his background or his status at the Royal Academy.

The Hay Wain won a gold medal, and Constable was deluged with orders

from French dealers, including Arrowsmith,

who confidently rented an apartment

for Constable to use when he came to collect his prize.

He wrote "The trip from Brighton is so convenient and the King

"himself awaits the opportunity to express his admiration.

"I will make every arrangement possible for your comfort -

"will you come?'"

I'm afraid Mr Constable is very busy presently.

Back in Brighton, Constable seemed to

find this adulation extremely irritating.

He flatly refused to visit France,

and his xenophobia increased with each letter

from Paris that arrived addressed to Monsieur Constable Payagiste.

But even here, it seemed, there was no escape.

His next door neighbour was a successful French portrait painter

called John James Masquerier.

Predictably, he loathed Masquerier, but did however meet many

eminent men who came to have their portraits painted.

Just the sort of people he liked - Enlightenment thinkers.

Gideon Mantell, the fossil hunter, Horace Smith, the poet,

and Michael Faraday, the scientist.

It's a mark of his contradictory character to consider that,

in the same year that Constable was painting The Hay Wain,

with its nostalgic vision of a world free of mechanisation,

he should also become friendly with Faraday,

who was busy perfecting his electrical motor.

Though he resents the time he has to spend painting his

French commissions - flogging the "dead horses" as he called them,

he compensated with long walks

across the downs with his sketchbook.

In one of the lectures that Constable delivered towards

the end of his life, organised, in fact, by his friend

from Brighton, Michael Faraday, he said,

"Painting is a science

"and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature.

"Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch

"of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?"

I think Brighton was a significant turning point in Constable's career.

He began to regard his own work as an experimental journey

and embraced scientific progress.

At the same time, he turned away from his obsessive

pursuit of accuracy and instead sought to reveal a deeper

kind of emotional truth in his painting.

His work was becoming critically and financially appreciated

for the first time in his life whilst he lived here,

and he expanded his range of subjects and his techniques.

He painted only one six-footer in Brighton - The Chain Pier.

The working out of the relation between the traditional,

the old, the rural and the modern and the contemporary is

something I think that first happens in Brighton.

The pier had been opened in 1823.

It was the first major pier built in Britain, and it was also

a suspension pier and a piece of new technology as well.

I'm absolutely fascinated hearing that - in this case he's

-painting cutting-edge technology?

-I think the painting is him

working his way through his conflicting feelings about Brighton.

It's the place where the ideology,

the conventions of the picturesque fall apart because they're

brought up against the reality of the urban development in Brighton.

And for all his reactionary political views,

Constable was a, visually, very honest painter

and so he couldn't ignore the wreck as it were of Brighthelmstone,

the little fishing port, in its transition into Brighton.

From the end of his street, in a few minutes

he could be in open countryside, or ranging along the coast to the

west to Shoreham, or to the east to Rottingdean.

In this landscape, which offered such a rich variety

of contrasting vistas, he painted some of his best oil sketches.

His ability to transcribe a scene

with extraordinary speed and economy,

was never more effective than in the seascapes he painted here.

He said, "There's nothing here

"for the painter but the breakers and the sky."

And that's what you find in his oil sketches, which are wonderful.

They become somehow freer,

more vigorous, as he just tries to transcribe what he's seeing.

Very simple, with economy, but with great force.

Another clear indication of Constable's enhanced status

is the fact that Turner was now keenly aware of his work,

and for the first time, following in his footsteps.

In one of his letters he refers to him almost like Voldemort

when he said, "He, who would be lord of us all."

It's almost like he can't bring himself to mention Turner's name.

So when Turner arrives here,

this is one of the rare moments

when he might be aware of a rivalry with Constable.

The position from where he looks at Brighton seems to contrast

almost deliberately with Constable.

So Turner is sighted out at sea and he's looking towards

the sun which is dissolving the town behind it into light.

Sadly, Constable's Brighton summer didn't last.

In January 1828 his seventh child was born,

but less than a year later Maria died of tuberculosis.

The family returned to Hampstead.

With bitter irony, a few weeks before she passed away,

her father had also died, and despite all threats to the contrary,

left her £20,000.

A substantial fortune, but this was of little consolation now.

In the elections to the Royal Academy the following autumn,

to everyone's surprise, including his own,

Constable was finally made a full member.

"Mr Constable and Mr Danby were then put on the ballot,

"and the numbers proving to be for Mr Constable 14, Mr Danby 13."

So in a sense, this was the culmination of his career ambitions,

but it also came so late, and it's amazing to see

that the final result, he only won by a single vote.

He was still dividing opinion, even this late on in his life.

But coming so soon after Maria's death,

this vindication of his work brought him little joy.

The pictures he made in the last decade

of his life are less well known,

and to me they reveal another change in his work.

It was now no longer necessary to please either clients or

the Academy and his expressive, loose handling of paint,

which I love, becomes more prevalent.

For lots of his early critics,

Constable's late style was a big, big problem.

But for me, pictures like this, they're intensely personal visions.

You sense that, by now, Constable's not so much interested in painting

a view from a particular spot, he wants to transcribe this kind

of subjective psycho-drama that's broiling about inside his own head.

After all, painting is another word for feeling.

Take the rainbow - surely the rainbow has got to be symbolic,

because a rainbow like that couldn't have existed with the light

coming from the direction in which Constable had painted it.

He would have known that, so it seems as though he left his

strict adherence for the truth of nature behind.

That didn't matter though, because this is a picture about freedom -

he's exploring, he's experimenting with technique,

he's using the end of his brush, he's laying down these thick

clumps of impasto and he's vigorously using a palette knife,

so much so that he said that in this picture, he'd cut his own throat.

But did that mean he felt the picture was any less finished?

Personally, I feel we need to get over any lingering prejudices

about how finished his pictures seemed then or even seem today.

Constable's late handling of paint has a really modern feel,

and I think its influence is visible in 20th-century artists

like Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach.

Constable died in 1837 in his painting room in Hampstead.

He was still largely unappreciated in his own country,

and when the contents of his studio were sold,

some pictures went for as little as £3 or £4.

Now I've seen the places that made John Constable a painter,

and I've seen more of his work than I ever knew existed,

can I see him as a revolutionary artist?

Well, there was one place where this was never in doubt,

where his techniques were studied and admired,

and where his legacy is clearly visible...

..in the progressive art of that great enemy, France.

If there's one thing that Constable demanded of other artists,

it's that they use their eyes

when they were considering a scene in front of them.

And, if I'm honest, I don't think I've ever properly

looked when I've thought about his pictures in the past.

I mean there are aspects of his personality,

his sarcasm about his contemporaries, his parochialism,

his jingoism, that frankly I don't find all that sympathetic.

But there was another side to Constable which was much more

revolutionary, as I've discovered.

I mean, he was upending the hierarchy of painting

so that finally people would start

to take landscape seriously as an art form.

Decades before the Impressionists, he was painting out of doors,

he was interested in recording fleeting

and ephemeral impressions, and as time wore on,

became enamoured with laying down thick, almost abstract,

paint that just wouldn't look out of place in the 20th century.

He put it really beautifully, he said

"It's the business of the painter not to contend with

"nature, but to make something out of nothing,

"in attempting which, he must almost of necessity become poetical."