We were riding the National Express coach through East Anglia in the UK and I could not help but exclaim, that the countryside was picture book perfect. Almost like the landscape paintings one saw in the Tate Brittania done by John Constable. “This is ‘Constable Country’,” exclaimed my English companion, “this is the area John Constable the English artist, loved and remains unspoilt, just like Constable painted it back in the 1800’s.” 

John Constable, one of the Britain’s greatest landscape painters, was born in Suffolk in 1776, but, didn't begin to paint seriously until 1811 when he was 35. Most of his paintings feature the open landscapes of southern England. If for most artists, painting was a way of expressing one’s feelings, for Constable, painting was just another word for feeling. For most landscape artists, a scientific understanding of how nature works is not considered necessary and they believe that their common sense and imagination will tell them all they need to know. Constable was different. It was visible that besides his affinity with nature, there was an innate need to research different aspects of nature, in all the paintings he did.

Constable was known for the domination of the sky in his landscape art. Of all the aspects of nature that artists have tried to imitate through the ages, the sky has been the most poorly executed from the scientific point of view. However, it was Constable's experience of working in a windmill with his father that gave him considerable familiarity with the sky and the weather.  ‘Hadleigh Castle,’ (1828) painted in his last 10 years is a fitting example to this.

Constables’ rainbows are almost as well known as his clouds. Clouds are present in one form or the other in English skies but rainbows can appear with startling clarity across the sky after a sudden shower. Here too Constable studied the science behind the production of a rainbow and they began to be regarded as a ‘personal emblem’ in 1931 when he included it dramatically in his painting of  ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’. This was the most monumental and delightful rendering of this natural spectacle ever to appear in his art. This was the greatest of his Salisbury landscapes and here he returns to evocative expressionism, where the image is grand, which allows the eye no rest but drags you in fascination, to the blackness around the cathedral.

Constable’s most important painting from the early part of his career was ‘A Scene on the river Stour’, which is popularly known as ‘The White Horse’. Painted in 1819, the painting was larger than anything he had tried at the time. This huge and expensive canvas got him good reviews in the press and this was the first painting he sold for 100 guineas. With this painting, he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. Completed in 1821, ‘The White Horse’ represents one of Constable’s favourite places in Suffolk, and features a hay-wain (a type of horse-drawn cart) crossing the River Stour. The whole painting emanates the sense of tranquillity one can find on a mid-summer's day, in this part of the English countryside. And if one visits the same spot in the village of Flaxford today, the view is much the same.

After his wife Maria died in 1828, Constable felt a general sense of hopelessness, losing his conviction that his art was worth pursuing. His friend Fisher tried to encourage him saying, “some of the finest works of art have been the result of periods of distress.” But in 1829, Constable wrote back saying, “my grevious wound only slumbers, could I get afloat on a canvas of six feet, I might have a chance of being carried away from myself.” Despite the depression, in 1829, Constable pulled out all the stops and sent 'Hadleigh Castle' to the Academy. He made two versions of this composition - the one hanging in the Tate has an expressionistic feel to it. It is a painting charged with an obvious foreboding intensity, onto which Constable projected the blackness of his own emotions at the time. The painting for the Academy however was subdued with effects reminiscent of a Rembrandt.

It was only at the age of 52 that Constable was at last elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, only to be told by its President that he was ‘peculiarly fortunate’ to be chosen, when there were other painters on the list. In an attempt to counter the neglect and misunderstanding of his art, he collaborated with David Lucas on a series of mezzotints, accompanied by explanatory texts. Meeting failure even here, Constable wrote to Leslie: ‘every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms?’ Constable had once found endless beauties’ in a ‘happy country’ but in his old age was beset by ‘continual storms.’