The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent Belgium Shows John Constable's Oil Sketches

Written by Andreas Griffin Wednesday, 30 November 2011 20:30

Ghent, Belgium.- The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent is proud to present "John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum" on view through January 29th 2012. The exhibition explores the later works of John Constable, Britain's best-loved landscape painter, and showcases some of the finest paintings from the V&A's world-renowned Constable collection. It includes the full-size oil sketches for 'The Hay Wain' and 'The Leaping Horse', two of the painter's most prestigious works. Both of these important sketches have been cleaned specially for the exhibition, revealing their original colours and tonalities for the first time in living memory. These are displayed alongside a number of the artist's watercolours, drawings and oil studies. From the turn of the 19th century these works have captured the public imagination as representations of archetypal English landscape.

John Constable was born in East Bergholt in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk countryside that was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things." He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized "Hagar and the Angel" by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally. In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue art and entered the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer. His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain. Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.

He did, however, make occasional trips further afield. In order to make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found dull work—though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted occasional religious pictures, but according to John Walker, "Constable's incapacity as a religious painter cannot be overstated." Constable adopted a routine of spending the winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in the summer. And in 1811 he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings. Although he had scraped an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first important canvas, "The White Horse", which led to a series of "six footers", as he called his large-scale paintings. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy that year, and in 1821 he showed "The Hay Wain (a view from Flatford Mill)" at the Academy's exhibition. Théodore Géricault saw it on a visit to London and was soon praising Constable in Paris, where a dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought four paintings, including "The Hay Wain", which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, winning a gold medal.


In his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England, but in France he sold more than twenty in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad." In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarrelled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet. After the birth of their seventh child in January 1828, his wife, Maria fell ill and died of tuberculosis that November at the age of forty-one. Thereafter, he always dressed in black and cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life. Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.

Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical "Stonehenge", 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted. In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London; "The Chain Pier", 1827, for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella". The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is "Seascape Study with Rain Cloud", painted in around 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea. Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows", 1831, and in "Cottage at East Bergholt", 1833.


The Ghent Museum of Fine Arts is situated at the East side of the Citadelpark (near the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst). The museum holds a large permanent collection of art from the Middle Ages until mid 20th Century. The collection focuses on Flemish Art (Southern Netherlands) but also has several European - especially French - paintings. It also has a large collection of sculpture. Next to its permanent collection the museum organises temporary exhibitions (approximately 2 every year). The museum building was designed by city architect Charles van Rysselberghe around 1900. In 2007, the museum reopened after a 4 year restoration project. The museum is a member of The Flemish Art Collection. This is a structural partnership joining the three main museums of fine arts in Flanders: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges and the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts. The museums’ collections have all been developed in a similar way and complement each other perfectly. Together, they offer a unique, representative overview of Flemish art from the 15th to the 20th century. As partners sharing the same responsibility in our cultural heritage, the three museums exchange their expertise, they strive for a more sustainable, high quality management and international awareness of their collections, including works that are part of the world patrimony. Amongst the highlights of the collection are "Christ Carrying the Cross" by Hieronymus Bosch, "Portrait of a Kleptomaniac" by Théodore Géricault, "Portrait of Giovanni Paolo Cornaro" by Tintoretto, "The Flagellation of Christ" by Peter Paul Rubens and "Jupiter and Antiope" by Anthony van Dyck. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.mskgent.be

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