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Birth
Constable was born in Suffolk in June, 1776. -
Period: to
Childhood, adolescence and youth
He painted many landscapes around his home. The area is now known as Constable Country and has a walk taking in some of his haunts. He worked in his father’s corn business when he left school, although he studied art when his father gave him an allowance. -
Life choice
He turned down a teaching position, choosing to paint instead. -
Dedham Vale
One of Constable´s first major works. Even at this early stage of his career the Constable aesthetic is in evidence: close observation of nature, especially of the sky, the style that the French author Stendhal would later call ‘the mirror of nature.’ Constable was born and grew up in East Bergholt in Suffolk in the Dedham Vale part of the Stour Valley. -
Portrair of Maria Bicknell
He had known her since 1800 and courted her since 1809, only for her family – her grandfather was the Rector at East Bergholt – to oppose the union. -
Period: to
Marriage
He married Maria Bicknell in 1816, despite her parents opposing the marriage. When she died in 1828, he decided never to paint again, although he later changed his mind. -
Flatford Mill
It was the first of Constable’s ‘six footers’ and is another work now at Tate Britain. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1818 as Scene on a Navigable River and re-named Flatford Mill in 1819. -
The Hay Wain
One of the most popular attractions at the National Gallery in London, The Hay Wainis now perhaps the most famous of English landscape paintings. But there’s an irony here, for it failed to find a buyer when shown at the Royal Academy in 1821 and was feted not in Britain but in France, where it won the Gold Medal from Charles X after being exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824, and inspired the French Romantics Delacroix and Gericault -
Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop´s Grounds
Constable met John Fisher in 1798, and he became an important patron. He became Bishop of Salisbury in 1807 and often invited Constable to visit, where he would sketch the great medieval Cathedral. In 1822, Fisher commissioned a work from Constable. The painter chose to show the Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, with Fisher and his wife shown looking back at the Cathedral in the bottom left corner. -
Hadleigh Caste
In 1828, Maria died, leaving Constable devastated. This six-footer reflects the sombre, melancholic mood of the years that followed for Constable. He had first seen Hadleigh Castle in Essex in 1814, when he sketched the landscape, and from this he developed the 1829 image. The Castle is no more than decaying ruins, the landscape craggy and ragged and the cowherd separated from his beasts. Constable described himself at this time as a ruin of a man. -
Member of the Royal Academy
In 1829 at the age of 52, Constable became a member of the Royal Academy. He gave lectures on landscape painting and criticized the then current Gothic Revival movement. -
Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow
This 1836 work is the last of Constable’s Hampstead works. He adds an imagined windmill to the scene, a nod perhaps to the influence of Jacob van Ruisdael, the Dutch landscape master whose work often featured windmills. There’s another rainbow that cuts through the dark clouds above the Heath – symbolic, perhaps, but Constable was also deeply interested in the science of optical phenomena like rainbows. -
Death
John Constable died in March, 1837 from heart failure. He was buried in St. John’s church, Hampstead, London, where his wife and two of their 7 children are also buried.
