Changing the Landscape

As this show's catalogue explains, Constable intended these major works for the absurdly crowded walls of the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London. Recognition at these shows was crucial to professional success, esteem and sales. And size was key to standing out among the hundreds of paintings on view.

Constable had become a painter against the wishes of his country-squire father. His difficult in-laws were equally displeased at the notion of their daughter being married to a good-for-nothing starving artist. Recognition and professional status -- not to mention sales -- mattered to Constable, to the point sometimes of obsessing him. "Six-footers" held the promise of both kudos and cash.

They had artistic promise, too.

Constable's art was about providing a kind of direct, unvarnished access to the subjects that he showed. And that access was made more impressive and convincing on a six-foot scale. Detail gets multiplied with the increase in size -- there's simply more room on the canvas for more stuff -- and it's easier for a viewer to get lost in it. There's also less shorthand in a bigger picture: fewer places where the little dog turns out to be made of three brushstrokes, and more places where each stroke stands for a single "pixel" in a landscape that's been analyzed and atomized under the artist's almost scientific gaze. (Constable himself was keen to think of landscape painting as a branch of science.)

Of course the problem with a big picture that is supposed to provide a "live" record of every detail of one instant in the passing show is that it simply can't. Such a canvas is too big to really get set up alongside a dripping lock. Even if it could be brought outdoors, there's no way for an artist to cover its expanse with paint -- and make it hang together as a decent-looking, detail-filled picture -- while working on the fly. The drawings, little oil sketches and smaller finished paintings in this exhibition may have been done, or at least started, outside, as genuine records of instants in rural life. A six-footer required the kind of concentration, slow labor and revisions that only a studio setting could provide. And yet, for Constable, such massive finished pictures had to feel, as much as possible, just like a smaller outdoor work.

Enter the full-size sketch. It allowed an entire composition to be roughed in and rethought at will. Subjects and details could be brought in from smaller drawings and from studies done on-site -- even sometimes by another artist -- and the breaks between them covered up. Any passage that caused trouble could be worked out, erased, then worked up again from scratch.

In all Constable's talk on art, "freshness" is a crucial theme. A picture ought to look like an instant "effusion," derived from nature at a single go. The full-size sketch for such a picture, however, which was never meant to leave the studio, could be as clotted and obviously labored as it needed to be to get its solutions right. And then another, finished picture could be worked up from it that looked as though it came direct from life.

Both sketches and paintings have plenty of wild brushwork, and both kinds of pictures have earned Constable praise as a descendant of Titian and as godfather to Monet and Pollock. I think a subtler view of painterly technique actually shows Constable's two modes to be very different.

The sketches work as a pictorial shorthand: A quick slash of the brush stands for an entire branch, a slice with the edge of a palette knife can render a whole wooden beam, clouds are matted whirls of paint. Strokes overlie strokes that overlie strokes, as Constable comes to terms with his subjects and the structure of his picture. He lets details get blurred out, because they do not matter.

The finished paintings also depend on very visible, impressive brushwork, but it spells out detail with almost excessive zeal. The brushwork doesn't elide or cancel detail out, the way it does in the sketches. "The character of his details," said a contemporary review of "The Lock," "appear as if struck out with a single touch."

The vigorous paint in the "finished" landscapes is to the sketches' raw brushwork what absurdly complex penwork is to a shorthand scrawl -- perhaps equally illegible, but to different effect.

The sketches find easy, quick pictorial equivalents for nature. They depend on a bravura artist's shorthand tricks, the kind of stylish, stylized "manner" that Constable despised in works of art. The exhibited six-footers, on the other hand, want to achieve what Constable called a "natural painture." They aim to render nature through a series of direct, one-to-one equivalences of noticeable brushstrokes to optical features in the rural scene.