Works by John Constable
159 works · 129 msJohn Constable painted the Stour valley around his Suffolk birthplace, and watched the sky so closely that he noted the weather, the light and the hour on his sky studies, often on the back.
His father, a corn merchant, owned Flatford Mill and expected John to take over the business; only in 1799 was John allowed to train as a painter, at the Royal Academy Schools. He said he loved the sound of water leaving mill dams, and willows, rotten planks and slimy posts. For several of the big Stour scenes now known as the six-footers he first painted a full-size sketch to test the design, and Stratford Mill is one: children fish from the bank while a man poles a barge along the river, all in loose, heavy strokes. The Hay Wain found no buyer at the Royal Academy in 1821, yet at the Paris Salon of 1824 Charles X gave it a gold medal.
In 1821 he told his friend John Fisher he had done a good deal of skying. Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, oil on paper from 1821–1822, is all sky: grey cloud banks, patches of blue and a strip of pink light at the bottom. From 1824 he kept his family in Brighton for his wife's health and turned from large Stour scenes to coastal ones; in Hove Beach a low sun burns pink over grey surf and a dark cloud moves in. Maria died in 1828, and his style grew more broken. Hadleigh Castle, the first picture he showed as a full Academician, sets a ruined tower on a hilltop over the Thames estuary under a heavy, torn sky.
Sources: Wikipedia, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery of Art.
