Constable

World of Art

by Michael Rosenthal

Traces the development of the career of the English artist and analyzes his paintings, water colors, and drawings.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 1987

Reviews

[Timothy Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning: I only really review books I like! Life is short. I try not to start books I might not like (or at least to not finish them). My reviews don't make much effort to be objective.

I haven't read Rosenthal's 'Constable: The Painter and his Landscape', but it was published in 1986 so I am guessing the book I read was something of a paraphrase, coming out the following year. The great thing about this Thames and Hudson publication is its copious illustrations - it's like a gallery of its own.

Rosenthal's writing style is intricate. It is exactly what one would expect from an aesthete. He has a tendency towards ellipsis when it comes to relative pronouns, and enjoys embedding subclauses within subordinate clauses. This is fine once you have got used to it, but it does take some getting used to, and I have no doubt that some people would find it an obstacle to enjoyment, as I did initially. Style is a very personal thing, and Rosenthal has every right to his own standards of economy and precision with the written word, but as Constable and all other professional artists have found, there is a balance to be struck with works for public consumption (I know this, because I have frequently failed to strike that balance myself!)

That said, I found Rosenthal's insights into Constable's technique, development, limitations and career invaluable. Where necessary the author is not afraid to be a harsh critic of his subject's paintings (and I now have a much better understanding of Constable), but this judicial severity is always extended to his contemporaneous critics as well, sometimes to searingly accurate psychological effect: "... we have to entertain the possibility that it was because he lacked the grace and dishonesty necessary for the deft manipulation of institutional politics that his peers preferred not to acknowledge his real achievements in landscape until 1829."

There could have been more tying in of such things as the Corn Laws and Catholic Emancipation, but the author points out that this is as much a shortcoming of a more general vagueness with regard to the current understanding of the social history of the period. As Constable's father was a miller (and later a grain exporter), it is not surprising he leant towards the conservative outlook of the landed old guard. The flipside of this parochialism perhaps, is that John Constable maintained a touching fidelity to the landscape of his birth, and that painting for him was at times a kind of natural worship.

Extremely worthwhile read.

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting things about this book is the final chapter. Rosenthal admits here that there is a lack of research into the interrelationships between writer and painters of the period that make it difficult to understand the vagaries of the reception of Constable during his lifetime. Constable was ambitious but was not an unproblematic member of the establishment. As the son of a miller who had done well, he had some avenues open to him but also faced quite a bit of prejudice eg possibly against his Suffolk accent and his rude manners.
Making works for public exhibition had imposed criteria which probably were not his own. Such as the concept of 'finish' rather than 'sketchiness', which could be more like the later impressionism.
Constable had to work hard for years to gain the artistic skills necessary to make it as a top class artist. He also painted landscapes that were not fashionable and didn't want to be a 'history' painter. A genre that was more in demand.
I've lived with reproduction of 'The Haywain' all my life. I had assumed the working class value put on this painting was to do with the process of rapid urbanisation. Majority of town dwellers had only recently come from the countryside and had to face a radical change of conditions and culture in towns and cities. The culture of the previous rural life was strongly evoked in a positive and social way by Constable.
The artist was a man of many contradictions. He was a Tory, a conservative, who at times expressed vehemently anti-radical sentiments. But his studies of weather and clouds were interesting in their abstraction from a photographic reality and were for him important in charging a landscape painting with a mood that stood in for the truth of larger socio and political changes that were taking place. To me this suggests a pre-modern approach to painting that he probably would have taken further if people had appreciated what he was doing. 'The Haywain' is a complex painting and it is interesting to me that this didn't seem to pose a problem for the later working class fans. A painting can of course mean things to an audience quite separate from the professed views of the artist.
"Constable’s conservatism was, albeit occasionally, of a paradoxically radical nature. In common with such later pioneers as Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) in music, he was a radical conservative, an innovative traditionalist, and this was as true of his cultural politics as it was of his artistic practice." Brian Young, 2017
‘Religion and Politics’, in Amy Concannon (ed.), In Focus: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows exhibited 1831 by John Constable, Tate Research Publication, 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publ..., accessed 17 December 2021.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

--- "Although Napoleon's blockade was never wholly effective, a drive to self-sufficiency spurred unprecedentelly intensive cultivation over Britain, with the exceptionally high prices encouraging the cultivation of poor land, while the demands of the armed forces reduced the labouring classes to numbers which had full employment at reasonable wages. The ploughman was symbolically important." (Rosenthal: 78-9)
--- "They thought pictures looked 'natural', or rivalled the masters. The moral character of Constable's work, which we discern only with the guidance afforded chiefly in Constable's letters, remained hidden." (Rosenthal: 123)
--- "Although there is a beguiling autobiographical content to the painting, this should not be stressed to overwhelm it. Louis Hawes placed Hadleigh Castle within a tradition of painting ruined castles." (Rosenthal: 178)

This book describes Constable's landscapes and how he painted them technically and thematically. It shows why Constable spent most of his career painting landscapes and it explains the meaning and form of some of his landscapes. Their reception by critics and the public of some of his landscapes is also included.

I would not have liked the book very much had Constable painted anything more than landscapes. However, Constable was a landscapist and this justifies the emphasis the book places on this genre. I liked when the author criticises those who use his bibliographical details to explain his paintings and I also liked the advice at the end of the book. But I hated the fact that illustrations were located not close to the text that refers to them. Overall, I think this is a very good introduction to the artist and his most immediate historical and artistic context.

[Tim Nason · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️ Amazingly comprehensive. The author wished he could expand the book’s scope. As it is, sentences are dense with qualifying and parenthetical phrases, making it a tiring read. Despite the wealth of historic context and the exacting attention to Constable’s techniques and subject matter, I would like to read more about the artist in something with a more novelistic approach. Illustrations are profuse but often appear apart from references to them in the text, necessitating much page turning.