Changing the Landscape

John Constable's Large Paintings Put Fresh Details on a Grand Scale

"Wivenhoe Park, Essex," painted at least in part outside, is in the National Gallery's Constable show. (National Gallery Of Art)

Imagine that it's the early 1800s, and you decide to paint the ultimate in realistic landscapes.

You want to make the picture huge, so there's room for all the rural detail you intend to capture, and so it's sure to outshout its rivals.

You want to paint the whole thing outdoors, "live," so its many details can be transferred straight from the things they represent.

You want to have your painting freeze a single passing instant, complete with lots of fleeting incident -- scudding clouds, rushing water, laborers at work -- to prove that it was truly captured on the fly.

And you want to pull the momentary scene apart into its tiniest component parts, so that each sparkle on a leaf or dimple on a brick can be translated onto canvas with a single dab of paint.

In this moment shortly before the birth of photography, you want to become almost a transcribing instrument -- an eye hooked directly to your brush's tip.

Of course, that can't be done. The best you can do is fake it.

"Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings," which opens today at the National Gallery of Art, lets us look deep into one artist's most impressive fakery.

For this show, 12 of the largest canvases by the last, and possibly greatest, of England's famous landscape painters have been brought together in one place, along with many smaller related works. More importantly, this is the first exhibition to hang eight of John Constable's showpiece canvases alongside the eight giant "sketches" that the artist made for them in his London studio -- preparatory oils just as big as the finished pictures, with nearly identical contents and composition, but with an entirely different, much coarser technique.

It's easy to enjoy this exhibition without considering the pairings' significance. Each of the "six-footers," as Constable called his giant landscapes, is full of things to look at and think about and take pleasure in. Each picture's six-foot sketch is equally rewarding, if often in a very different way. Both finished canvases and sketches have been judged as among the greatest works of Western painting. (In the 20th century, the very "modern-looking" sketches started to have the upper hand. In Constable's own day, and for several decades after his death in 1837, they didn't even count as works of art.) But there's something about comparing the two, and figuring out the ways they must have worked together, that makes more pleasing, interesting sense of both.

No other artist ever worked this way. No one can say quite why Constable did. This exhibition, however, begs us to give it a shot.

Constable's problem may have begun with issues of scale.