Changing the Landscape

Or, since that's essentially impossible, at least a picture wants to signal that it's got directness as its goal. Take the famous "sparkle" that almost covers some of Constable's pictures -- a flutter of tiny flecks of white sometimes called his "dew" or "snow" (or, by his enemies, "whitewash"). It becomes his trademark device, almost a Constable cliche, because it so perfectly encapsulates what his art is all about: aggressive micro-effects of paint being used to stand for a very particular, passing effect seen in the real word.

More than anyone else, Constable learned to mimic that very English moment when a distant patch of sun briefly comes clear within a cloudy sky, and every drop of moisture on the nearby scene reflects it. The striking result is a web of tiny patches of brightness -- on water dripping from a lock, on a horse's tack, on a barge's wake or even on the edge of a leather sole -- against a darker field of foliage or ground or lumber that's otherwise cloudlit and dour. Constable himself talked about his irresistible tendency to convey "bleak," "sleety" conditions -- though he also boasted that "The Lock" was "beautifully silvery, windy and delicious," which is the other side of the same coin.

Such weather produces tiny specks of Englishness that could be rendered, "directly," as a field of specks of paint. They are perfect grist for Constable's mill.

That's because Constable's pictures weren't subjectless studies in realist effects. They had real social, almost political, content, as certain Constable scholars have been emphasizing for more than two decades already. (This show mostly ignores their ideas.) Constable's art was about giving a kind of timeless, nostalgic view of rural life where everything was seen as going "right" in the Olde Englysh countryside. It's almost a P.G. Wodehouse view of life in rural England, and it still survives as central to the myth of Englishness.

Constable, like his family and friends, was invested in a static, rural view of England. His pictures protect his investment. "Mr. Constable's style is rural, adapted to rural objects almost exclusively," said one critic's review.

The Constables weren't really in the thick of the old agricultural order. They owned mills and barges and mostly made their money moving and trading grain and coal, both in the countryside and in London. But they depended on the supplies and demands of the land to keep their business going. They wanted social stability, at any cost, to keep their markets stable. Constable's art reflected what scholar Michael Rosenthal has called this "ultra-Tory, rather than just conservative" view, where the hard labor -- even the poverty -- of the many is a natural feature of a world where the few are meant to prosper and rule. Every laborer "is a rebel and blackguard," said Constable. "He is only made respectable by being kept in solitude and worked for himself and by one master -- whom he has always served."

The painter found ideas of social change or reform repugnant and dangerous. His paintings made such ideas seem unnecessary, even unnatural.

All's well, always, in Constable's heartland -- no sign of the peasant suffering, riots and rebellion that in fact were setting fire to his native Suffolk, or of the mechanization and unemployment they were in reaction to. Peaceable, steady, "sensible" labor was what kept England afloat, according to the Tory view. That might even include, as a kind of model for such things, the peaceable labor of a man applying paint "in solitude," one dab at a time, to a canvas that's all about that rural peace. When hard at work on a picture, Constable said, "I feel I am performing a moral duty."

Constable doesn't render an ideal that seems remote and unattainable. As scholar Elizabeth Helsinger has pointed out, he proffered his model for how the world should be by suggesting that this was the way in fact it was, as transcribed direct from nature by him and his brush. Constable's six-footers make his conservative dream seem as real and present and current -- as normal and necessary to how things just happen to be -- as a cloudbreak dappling the dew, a horse leaping a stile, a bargeman opening a lock.

Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings runs through Dec. 31 in the East Building of the National Gallery, on the north side of the Mall at Fourth Street NW. It is open Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov/ .