Original subtitles

There have been few more powerful painters of landscape than John Constable.

He brought a scale, ambition and impact to a subject long considered amongst the lowest forms of art,

but he's largely celebrated as a nostalgic painter of a lost England.

Look a little harder at Constable's pictures, though,

and you discover an intense and radical vision at work which changed the course of British art.

John Constable was born in June 1776 here in East Burgholt, a small village in Suffolk.

He was the son of Anne and Golding Constable, a successful businessman,

and he was christened in this church.

But the real hubbub of family life and of his early childhood was a mile just down the road.

This is Flatford Mill, Constable's father's mill, here on the banks of the River Starr,

and it was this that was the very centre of the family business.

In fact, Constable's father owned another watermill upriver,

and also a windmill, as well as a boat building business,

and the navigation rights on this very busy stretch of water,

all of which provided the backdrop for Constable's carefree, happy, comfortable childhood.

But it also fuelled his art for the rest of his life.

Throughout the 1790s, the young constable spent his time sketching the rolling countryside which surrounded him.

And just as the century was coming to a close,

Constable's parents reluctantly consented to their son leaving Suffolk

and travelling to London to attend the academy schools.

1802 was a key year for Constable.

In April, he had his first exhibited painting at the Royal Academy.

We don't know exactly what it was, but all accounts seem to point to a landscape.

Then he was offered a job teaching at a Royal Military Academy,

which in the end he declined because, as he put it,

it will be a death blow to any prospects I might have of pursuing the art I love.

And then he makes his most famous resolution.

He says, I now vow to become a natural painter.

And this is one of a series of three or four works he makes in the summer of 1802

where we can see Constable trying to achieve what he set out to do.

Now, the idea of a natural painter is a slippery one

and it changes throughout Constable's career.

He says at the beginning, though, that he wants to produce a pure and unaffected view of nature.

And he does that by plonking himself out in the fields

and trying to sketch and then paint in oil what he sees.

And the view that he gives us is elevated, looking east, across the Stour Valley.

There's Dedham with its church beautifully rendered.

And then in the distance, the estuary, the view out to sea.

Now, at first sight, this looks a pretty good achievement.

But there's a couple of things to throw into the melting pot.

Certainly we're around the idea of pure naturalism.

Firstly, the composition for this work is taken directly from a work now in the National Gallery,

previously in the collection of George Beaumont, where Constable had seen it,

called Hagar and the Angel, by the French artist Claude Lorraine.

And here on the left-hand corner, where things are slightly fudged,

in Claude's original painting, there are two figures wrestling, so he takes that out.

So this is classically inspired.

Secondly, look at the detailing, particularly on the trees and the flecking in the foreground,

and you see an artist wrestling with the medium of oil paint.

It's not something he is naturally adept at using.

Now, at the Royal Academy, there was no instruction on how to paint,

let alone on how to paint landscape.

And what we see in works like this, which make them, I think, real jewels,

is an artist somehow struggling to learn to paint, to learn to master his medium,

and to find his own vision when confronted by nature.

But there was no market for natural paintings,

and Constable had no choice but to try and support himself

by securing commissions for portraits.

But as this painting shows, portraiture wasn't a skill he'd exactly perfected.

Constable's struggle for work was temporarily resolved in 1809,

when he got a commission to paint an altarpiece for this church

in the village of Nayland, a few miles away from Flatford.

He got the commission because his aunt lived here in the village.

And he produced an image of Christ blessing the sacraments,

the bread and the wine, which hung, as it still does, behind the altarpiece.

But his struggle for recognition continued,

and according to his father,

Constable's employment relied entirely on the kindness of friends,

and, as he put it, his son was still pursuing a shadow.

In the same year, he fell in love with Mariah Bicknell,

the daughter of Charles Bicknell, the solicitor to the Admiralty.

Mariah's family were sceptical that an out-of-work artist

could provide for their daughter,

and so it became even more crucial for Constable to develop his career.

In 1811, Constable came here, to the picturesque city of Salisbury,

to stay with the recently appointed Bishop of Salisbury,

Dr John Fisher, and his wife.

Fisher himself was an amateur painter who'd met Constable a few years before,

and was very taken with the young artist.

More importantly, Fisher also had a nephew, called John Fisher too,

who became Constable's closest friend as a result of his stay here,

and for the rest of his life, they wrote letters together,

and it's through the letters to John Fisher

that we know most of what Constable thought about the world and his art.

Equally important, though, for Constable, was this spectacular view.

He stood where I'm standing now with his sketchbook in 1811,

and then, over the next two decades, returned to paint this scene

and produced some of his most iconic work here.

This painting, from a few years later, 1823,

effectively made one of the most celebrated buildings in England

into a national treasure.

But Constable's craft as a painter was crystallised much closer to home.

Constable painted what I think is his first major oil piece

in the summer of 1814 when he was 39,

which makes him quite a late developer.

Right here, just near Flatford Mill,

and the scene depicts boat building,

which would have taken place down here in this self-same pit.

In fact, very little has changed in the scene.

And we know that Constable made sketches in ink,

but then set his easel up and worked straight onto the finished canvas,

and he worked in two stages.

First of all, he'd lay in using thin, opaque colours,

the basic composition of the men at work

and the landscape almost as it is now.

And then, after a few days when it had dried,

he'd use coarser, more granular paint

to put in the fine details,

the foliage, the light, and so on.

But we know from letters that he worked through

to the late afternoon until, as he says,

he could see the smoke billowing from Bridge Cottage just next door,

and that was the sign that the fires had been lit

and the supper was just about to be cooked.

In the sketch,

we see a very bustling scene of activity,

of boats being built,

which is slightly modified and made more tranquil in the finished oil.

There's a man down there who seems to be resting,

but there's a coil of rope underneath,

and perhaps he's scraping away or carving at some fine detail.

On the banks just over there, on the flat grass,

a man is shaping a keel,

and in the distance on the river is a man with a finished barge.

It's almost a manual, if you like, of how to build barges.

And even though at this time England is rapidly industrialising,

and the Napoleonic Wars are coming to a crescendo at Waterloo a few months later,

Constable is painting an image of a rural world getting on with its daily life,

and he's celebrating, in a way, the quiet drama of the everyday.

This work, called Flatford Mill, seen on a navigable river,

shows the family livelihood.

The river that they owned,

Golding Constable's lock, and the mill itself,

and Flatford Bridge, just visible in the left-hand corner.

And it's a painting, like boat building,

and it builds on the achievements of boat building,

that shows the countryside in action.

It's a painting that quietly invites you to say

what's happened and what's going to happen.

And in fact, it's clear when you look,

because this little gang of two or three barges

have come from the lock and been towed by the boy on the back of the horse,

upriver, and then they've jackknifed slightly and drifted,

but here's a guy with a pole trying to straighten them

and then navigate them underneath the bridge.

And you can see how, as the barge is being tethered,

the water is dripping off.

And then your eyes are taken around the two roots of the river,

and the painting has a kind of depth to it.

But what brings it to life, and what makes it such a major painting,

centres on the way that Constable paints it.

Constable has declared that painting is a science,

it's an inquiry into the laws of nature.

And even though this is a vast canvas,

one of his biggest to date,

all the evidence points to the fact that Constable

actually painted this, at least initially, outside.

Now, we know that he started with a sheet of glass on an easel,

having made various sketches from this vantage point high up,

and then he draws elements of the composition onto the glass using ink,

and then he puts paper onto the glass,

and the ink seeps through, and he's got his basic outline.

He then, we also know, makes oil sketches

and works around the subject matter.

And when he starts, with his primed canvas, ready for painting,

there'll be a few lines drawn to get the basic shape of the composition,

and then he starts to paint.

And he lays in things like the sky,

and he also lays in the main detail of the landscape.

And every tree leaf seems to have its own separate brushstroke.

And there seems to be at least 30 different tones of green here,

rather than just one unified green.

And then he puts the dabs of red to create the flowers

that are also the complementary of green.

And there's the tiny detailing of the magpies on the right-hand side

that seem to skate or fly across the surface of the canvas,

which activates it, and when your eye looks at the canvas,

it's drawn all over it.

And rather like looking at a scene out in nature,

the thing is never still.

And broadly, there are two themes or ways of looking at this picture.

One is universal and a kind of timelessness

embodied by the tiny figure of the reaper

threshing away in the meadow on the extreme right of the picture

and a symbol of time passing.

And then something specific and personal to Constable

that is embodied in the signature,

where it says, John Constable, 1817,

but it's not as if he's painted it onto the surface of the canvas.

It seems almost as if he's taken a stick

and scratched it into the earth,

or rather, one of the boys fishing, lying on the riverbank, has done that,

who in a way are Constable's alter egos,

a memory of himself as a young boy.

And ultimately, the painting seems to be a valediction

to what Constable himself described as his carefree boyhood.

Within a couple of years,

his father dead and the inheritance allowing him to marry Mariah,

Constable moves here, to Hampstead Village, north of London.

With the landscape of Suffolk a good day's journey away,

Hampstead Heath, on the edge of the city,

was effectively a home from home, a place to work.

And he'd bring his sketchbooks, and sometimes his easels,

and he'd study nature, its colours and its light.

And sometimes he'd survey the burgeoning city,

the fastest-growing city in Europe,

from which he sometimes wanted to escape.

But he didn't always confront the landscape vertically.

Sometimes he'd lie on his back

and focus that intense gaze upwards to the clouds.

The skies orchestrated the mood of a painting for Constable,

and nowhere is this more evident

than in a series of monumental canvases,

known as his six-footers,

did he began to paint in his London studio,

including, perhaps, the most famous landscape ever painted.

This modest, quiet backwater,

tucked in just behind his father's mill,

inspired one of the most popular and iconic pictures

in all of English painting.

The hay wane, or landscape at noon, as it was called

when it was first exhibited in 1821,

is a fresh, vibrant, comfortable picture.

Constable described it as characteristic of an English landscape.

And there's something of the high Anglican Tory

that is Constable in this work,

and I think that struck a chord with many people.

It seems to stave off the inevitability of industrial change.

It presents an idealised, tranquil world

that perhaps was threatened,

and people still like to hark back to that.

But Constable, at this time in his career,

was becoming an increasingly paradoxical artist.

And that, I think, is embodied in this work,

because scratch beneath the surface, at least metaphorically,

and what you start to see

are the signs of radical change

in Constable's practice as an artist.

The view is familiar.

Willie Lott's cottage on the left,

a woman either gathering water for washing

or wringing out the washing in the river.

There's a dog in the foreground.

There's a man fishing,

with his boat just visible on the far bank,

and a stream of figures in the field in the distance,

threshing the corn, harvesting.

And then, right centre stage,

is the hay wane itself,

a hay cart that seems to have come from the bank,

as you can see the muddy wheels,

then has made this extraordinary, almost impossible turn,

and is now in the process of turning again to the right,

you look at the left-hand wheel,

to go off to the Ford that Flat Ford Mill got its name from,

then go across the fields

and perhaps pick up the next bale of hay.

Now, some people have challenged some of the details

depicted by Constable in the work,

but not least the fact that this cart

couldn't successfully carry great bales of hay or the harvest

without them falling out the side.

The side panellings or bars are not high enough.

Now, what Constable's doing, in his own words,

is selecting and combining from nature.

He's also, as he did with Flat Ford Mill,

seeking to suggest something of, again,

what he calls the evanescence of the natural world,

with these flecked brushstrokes that bring the surface to life.

But finally, he's looking again, in his own words,

for an unadulterated truth of expression.

Now, this is a significant shift.

As a young, inexperienced painter,

he talked about truth to nature.

Now, he's talking about truth to expression.

In other words, how he feels,

and by extension, how we feel,

when we stand in front of a work or stand in front of nature.

It's our emotion, our feelings.

And, in fact, the idea of nature moving Constable

is both a physical sensation, it's never still,

and also something that comes from his gut and his heart.

Now, when this work was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1821,

the English were bemused by it.

Wonderfully ironic, given that it's now such an icon.

However, it was bought by a French dealer,

taken to Paris, and in 1824, in the French Salon,

was awarded a prize by the King of France, Charles X,

and the French, particularly the painter Delacroix,

saw in this work the seeds of a radical transformation

that Constable himself was able to realise

in what I think is his greatest work a year later.

This is the sixth and final one of Constable's big,

stour-set pieces, the most powerful,

and, by his own account, the most difficult.

It shows a horse leaping over a gate

that's about three feet tall to keep the cattle out,

but is enough for the horse itself to be able to get over it.

The horse has just towed a barge upstream,

way upstream from Flatford Mill,

and you can see other barges in the distance

that shows what's going to happen next

or where this barge will go.

Now, the location's called Float Jump,

which was along the towpath,

which Constable used to walk as a young boy

on his way to school.

It's also the boundary line along the River Stour

between Essex and Constable's native county of Suffolk,

and he's located himself and the view

on the south side in Essex,

looking over the river towards his beloved Suffolk,

but, of course, he's painting this vast six-footer

in his London studio,

and he skews the view,

and almost symbolically,

we see on the extreme right of the canvas

Dedham Church,

but if we were being true to nature

and true to the view as it is,

that church would be somewhere behind us

as we stand looking at the work.

But, as with the hay wane,

but more extremely here,

that doesn't matter.

That's not what the painting's about.

But the key to the painting, I think,

is found in the details.

We can see the water seeping through the sluice gates

underneath the horse and rider,

and there's a sense of almost being able to hear

that water trickling and flowing through,

and Constable draws our attention to that

with a faintly discernible net

that's put across to catch eels.

But the real sound of the picture

starts to emanate from the clattering of the hooves

as this figure leaps over a modest gate

but provides the central drama of the image.

Now, Constable is knowingly art-historical here.

Leonardo planned a great equestrian statue.

Velázquez and Van Dyck painted

monumental images of noblemen and kings

on great stallions.

What does Constable do, though?

He puts a communal garden barge boy

on a barge horse.

But in a way, he's saying it's just as heroic.

And in the way that he flecks paint around,

he gives us that sensation

of actually being on the horse

but of experiencing the wind itself

out of the canvas.

And what he's trying to achieve here,

and certainly to my mind gets very close to it,

is suggesting the idea of landscape

as total experience.

Now, have a look at this painting.

Apart from the fact that I've changed sides,

you probably think something's happened

to your television set

or maybe the filter on our camera's broken.

But actually, this is almost the same painting

as the Leaping Horse, but not quite.

It's a full-size sketch that Constable made.

And in fact, he's believed to have made

two vast sketched canvases using oil.

One of them was supposed to be the finished work.

We now think that that didn't work for him.

He dismissed it, and he turned it into this sketch.

But we don't know for certain.

But what we do know is that

if the finished version of the Leaping Horse

is landscape as total experience,

this final full-size sketch

is painting itself as total experience.

It's a work that seems to immerse and pull you in.

It's also a work whose images

seem to be shewn out of human clay

as much as paint.

It's a painting which seems to be somewhere

in the process of becoming before your eyes.

And at one level, Constable arrests

this dynamic, dramatic, flickering, fleeting moment.

But at the same time, he suggests it

by the fluid way that he slaps paint on.

And this is work that seems almost,

if we use the idea of the horse,

to let painting off the leash.

It's untethered.

And that suddenly, a new way of expressing

some truths about the natural world

are made apparent.

Now, actually, I don't think Constable

ever beats this sketch in the rest of his career.

I think very few artists in the history of Western art

get to this level of intensity and passion.

Plenty of people have done sketchy works,

but this has a real gravitas,

monumentality, grandeur and passion to it.

And it throws down a gauntlet

that is picked up by the French Impressionists

and Expressionists throughout the 20th century.

His wife, Mariah, developed tuberculosis,

and she and the children moved to Brighton in 1824,

hoping that the sea air would improve her health.

Constable made frequent trips between London and Brighton

and began making studies of the sea.

Although he didn't like the town and its people,

Constable was inspired by the dramatic and changeable weather.

This painting, The Chain Pier, was another six-footer

and the first depicting a landscape outside Suffolk.

The work itself was attacked by the London magazine

and didn't find a buyer until Constable's studio auction after his death.

The choppy, turbulent seas and dark clouds are often seen

as a reflection of Constable's concern for his wife's ill health.

Mariah Constable's health improved enough for her to give birth

to their seventh child at the beginning of 1828.

But by the summer, she was very ill, and in November, she died.

Constable was absolutely devastated.

The face of the world is changed to me, he said.

14 years before, when he was head over heels with Maria

just before they got married,

he'd come here on a sketching trip to Hadley Castle,

an old medieval ruin with spectacular views out across the Thames estuary to see.

And it was that image of an isolated, decaying ruin

that seemed to have struck a chord in his visual memory

and which prompted him, at the end of 1828,

to begin one of the most powerful and moving paintings of his entire life.

Constable's mood and work varied,

but he himself said it was no surprise that he painted raging storms.

And the painting that he thought would be considered his greatest

shows his old muse, Salisbury Cathedral,

almost enveloped by dark, swollen clouds.

This time, though, it was politics.

Constable, the Conservative, was aghast at the ongoing debate

about the Reform Bill of 1832,

which expanded urban constituencies and reduced rural ones.

And Constable commented that this was an attack

on the Constitution of England,

which would, quote,

only give the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people.

And so for Constable, in effect, England itself was under a cloud.

But the painting has a redemptive quality.

The rainbow is a biblical symbol of God's peace with mankind after the flood.

And here, after railing against the injustice of his wife's death,

Constable seems to be making his own peace with the world.

Constable's late work tends towards abstraction

and was highly influential.

The French Impressionists, for one,

picked up on the idea that landscape could be a vehicle

for avant-garde experiment.

John Constable died on 31 March 1837,

feeling that his work had not gained the recognition it deserved.

Ultimately, he emerges as a paradoxical figure,

a conservative man, but a radical artist,

whose work flew in the face of tradition rather than reinforcing it.