John Constable's Large Paintings Put Fresh Details on a Grand Scale
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006
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.
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.
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/ .