Language of the heart

John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the nearby village of East Bergholt. Magical names, redolent with the history imbuing Constable’s paintings of his native county. He immortalised the area in timeless images of extraordinary freshness and beauty. The Tate’s show of some 65 pictures does intelligent justice to a vision of landscape which continues to refresh the spirit.

As its title suggests, this exhibition focuses on the large-scale landscape paintings that Constable began to make in 1818–19, which measure around four-and-a-half feet by six and are often known as his ‘six-footers’. These were designed for exhibition at the Royal Academy, both to boost his career and to compete in scale and seriousness with the achievements of classical landscape painters, such as Claude, Ruisdael and Rubens. (The Ruisdael exhibition which has just finished at the RA is an excellent point of comparison here.) Constable’s own term for these symphonic topographical arrangements was the ‘great machines’. For many of them he made full-scale preliminary sketches, in oil on canvas, and in nine instances these studies have been reunited here with their finished pictures.

This majestic grouping forms the backbone of the exhibition and reopens the debate about the various merits of the sketch and the finished picture, particularly relevant to an era which values the unfinished over the highly polished. First thoughts appeal to us, and as such Constable’s freely painted sketches might be assumed to have the upper hand in this show. Certainly if one compares the Tate’s full-scale study of Hadleigh Castle with the finished painting (on loan from the Yale Center for British Art), the earlier picture is easily the more dramatic and tempestuous in terms of paint handling.