John Constable

Regency Portraits Catalogue Entry

Sitter in 6 portraits
Artist associated with 6 portraits
Constable is celebrated as one of England's greatest and most progressive landscape artists. ‘Painting is but another word for feeling’ Constable wrote in 1821 - ‘I should paint my own places best’. His affection for the Suffolk countryside, where he grew up, provided life-long inspiration for his art. Long before it was easy or fashionable, Constable preferred to paint outdoors; ‘the sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts … I love such things’. His hundreds of open-air sketches, which capture the skies with near scientific precision, brought a groundbreaking realism to his finished oil paintings. These helped bring an immediacy and authenticity to exhibition works later developed in the studio. In 1802 he declared that 'natural painture' - or landscape - could rival history painting. He won a gold medal at the 1824 Paris Salon for his work The Hay Wain (1821). However, Constable met with little contemporary success at home, for most of his career he struggled to find buyers for his work.