Constable's England

by Graham Reynolds

Constable's England accompanies an exhibition of the same name mounted at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of the festival Britain Salutes New York 1983 . This major exhibition was the first of the paintings of John Constable to be shown in the United States. The shaping of the exhibition and writing of the catalogue was entrusted to Graham Reynolds, the leading specialist on Constable. The images in the exhibition ranged from small oil sketches done in the open air to finished paintings on a large scale, selected to show not only the landscape subjects that Constable chose to paint but also the full scope of his remarkable development as an artist. In Constable's time England was divided into thirty-nine counties. Constable set foot in just over half of them; he never crossed the borders into Wales or Scotland, still less did he travel out of the country, even when his pictures were creating a furor in Paris is 1824. The scenes that enter signficantly into his painting are drawn from an even more restricted the six counties of Suffolk, Essex, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Sussex. Geographically, "Constable's England" is a severly limted concept. In his concentration on a small number of places studied over and over again Constable presents a sharp contrast with his great contemporary Turner, who took not only England, Scotland, and Wales, but also the whole of accessible Europe as his province. The publication includes an introduction to Constable and his oeuvre and catalogue entries with color illustrations of each of the works in the exhibition, grouped by the places they depict. There are also a biographical summary with chronology of Constable's life, a sketched map of "Constable's England," a bibliography, and a list of further reading. [This book was originally published in 1983 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Genres: Art

184 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1983

About the author

Arthur Graham Reynolds CVO OBE FBA (10 January 1914 – 13 October 2013) was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné.