John Constable: 8 works

'John Constable, one of the foremost landscape painters of the nineteenth century, was invited to paint this small landscape and a larger companion picture, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), by his patron and friend Major General Francis Slater Rebow, in the late summer of 1816.'

'The landscape study by John Constable, inscribed by the artist in letters scratched into the paint "9 July 1812", belongs to the painter`s period known a "the Suffolk years", when his native village os East Bergholt with its vales, lanes and rives was his main subject, whereas human figures rarely appear.'

'The way the serene pictures of Constable convey subtle changes in atmosphere, flutterings of the wind and the warmth of the sun's rays can be traced to the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters and his great French predecessor, Claude Lorrain. Constable learned this style of painting at the Royal Academy, which he entered in 1799, and after completing his studies, during his travels to the English Lake District, formed his own artistic views, based on the direct observation of nature.'

'This oil painting portrays the construction of a barge at a dry-dock owned by Constable's father.'

'This is the case with John Constable's loving replication of Claude's 'Landscape with a goatherd and goats'.'

'This occasion provided John Constable with urban subject matter unlike his more usual Suffolk landscapes. He may have been attempting a modern "historical landscape" in emulation of Claude Lorrain.'

'Salisbury and its cathedral were familiar to John Constable, through his intimate friendship with its bishop, Dr. John Fisher, and his nephew, Archdeacon John Fisher.'

'John Constable's intimate vision, as exemplified by this work, was characteristic of the newly intensified attitude toward nature adopted by the Romantic movement. He first visited this dell in 1800, when he wrote to a friend, "Here I am quite alone among the oaks and solitude of Helmingham Park...there are abundance of fine trees of all sorts."'