His final paintings are like Jackson Pollocks: RA’s Late Constable reviewed

On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion of the fine weather and the lack of village gossip, he added a disclaimer on the subject posterity would most like to hear about: his art. ‘You know that I do not like to talk of what I am about in painting (I am such a conjuror).’

Perhaps by that he meant he did not like to give away how he did his tricks. As Late Constable, the magnificent exhibition currently at the Royal Academy, makes clear, he was a true magician with paintbrush and palette. Before your eye he performs astonishing transformations. Take, for example, the little oil sketch ‘Rainstorm over the Sea’, c.1824–8.

It’s a picture of a sudden squall. A dark, mulberry-coloured cloud has appeared above the waves off Brighton beach (which are themselves a steely blue). Out to sea, the deluge is already falling in great slooshing curtains. Even the passage of the drops, cascading through the air, seems to be visible.

Constable has conveyed all this with half a dozen broad, brusque brush strokes, scything down his little picture. They remain obviously the marks of a wide brush loaded with thin pigment, the grooves left by the bristles undisguised. The absolutely remarkable thing is that Constable manages to make you see both at the same time: smears of paint which are, simultaneously, exactly like a downpour seen from a distance.

He performed that kind of miracle on a regular basis, as Late Constable makes clear. Even those who think they know his work intimately are likely to find it full of surprises. The fact is, we don’t know the art of this apparently familiar master all that well after all.