Charcoal mastery

In his foreword to the catalogue of John Hubbard’s Spirit of Trees, Duncan Robinson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, invokes John Constable. Indeed if Constable were alive today he might be John Hubbard. Although Hubbard is American, he has lived in Dorset for 45 years and although his paintings are far more abstract than Constable’s and have been inspired by foreign places as well as British — the Atlas Mountains, Spanish gardens, the Vaucluse in France — they approach nature in a similar way, with romantic feelings but a pragmatic eye.