V. Describe the picture ’’Wivenhoe Park, Essex’’ by John Constable

The realistic quality of Constable’s art can be clearly sensed in this painting. In fact, Constable catches the essential character of the English landscape so convincingly that we almost see and hear the drops of rain bending the leaves of grass on the green lands.

A generation earlier it had been suggested to Gainsborough, whom Constable admired, that he should paint the exact view of a country house. Gainsborough politely refused the commission, while Constable considered such a commission to be a challenge. Constable’s patron wanted his beautiful land to be recorded faithfully on canvas; he wanted all the peculiar features of his countryside to be fixed in paint.

For Constable the challenge consisted in meeting the patron’s demands on the one hand and on the other hand in developing his own language in accordance with his inclination to the truthful and poetic. And he successfully managed to cope with all the tasks he set before himself.

VI. Read the describing of the picture “Dedham Lock and Mill” (1820)

This is a brilliant example of Constable's view painting at its complete maturity. The salient features of the landscape are treated in sharp relief — even those not strictly necessary — yet they merge perfectly under a serene, perfect light. This painting contains, in synthesis, all the elements of landscape which Constable loved best: the river, the boats, the soaked logs, the river vegetation, the sun shining through the foliage of the tall trees, the scenes of rural life and, above all, Dedham Mill. The cultural origins of this work are apparent in the traditional composition, in the use of chiaroscuro, in the way the landscape fades into the distance, after the Dutch manner, and in the complex, laboured palette. The compact tree mass in the foreground is blocked in against a sky filled with movement, reflected in the calm and transparent waters over which plays a pallid sun, as we find in Ruisdael.

D

For Constable I have an affection that goes back to my earliest recollections. In the first years of my childhood, there hung in the halls of my father's house a large steel engraving of "The Cornfield". Often in the long hot summers of the Middle West, I used to lie on the floor, gazing for hours into this English landscape carried from the dry and burning world around me into a vista of blessed coolness, thick verdure, dampness and everlasting peace. I lived in that picture. To me it was more beautiful than a dream: the boy, flat on the ground drinking from a running brook; the sheep dog waiting patiently with turned head; the ambling flock; the old silent trees; the fat clouds reeking moisture...

Some years later, when I went to London to study pictures, I saw "The Cornfield" and many others by Constable, and my first impressions were confirmed. In his grasp of the stable, one might almost say formidable, repose that man feels in the presence of nature, and in communicating the spiritual contentment induced by companionships with nature. Constable is the master of the English school.

Constable never travelled outside England. He was slow to de­velop as an artist, and slow to become famous. In all these things he was the very opposite of Turner. If he was Wordsworthian in his attitude to nature, Turner was Byronic. The elements which seem so domesticated in Constable's pictures are at their most extreme and battling in Turner's grandest pictures. The large "Fire at Sea" depicts man's hopeless fight amid storm and disaster. Human beings are literal flotsam in a raging sea. Turner himself actually experienced the "Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour Mouth" in which wind and snow and spray sport with the unfortunate steamboat until it is barely visible except for a straining mast. There is a tremendous exhilarating terror in this moment when all nature's forces are unleashed. Something of the same drama is in "Rain, Steam, and Speed", where the glowing train forces its way over the high viaduct through the driving mist and rain — and here man is winning through, thanks to the newly invented steam engine. But Turner's intense receptivity to nature's moods made him able to capture also moments of utter tranquility. In the "Evening Star" there is nothing but the merging of sea and sky, day and night, as evening slowly sucks the colour from things; and only the diamond point of the single star shines out, caught tremblingly on the dark water. The same poignancy hovers about "The Fighting Temeraire" in which between dusk and day an old ship is tugged to its last berth. The ghostly hulk floats over the calm glassy sea, and the sun sinks like a bonfire in the west, seeming a symbol of the life that is ended, stirring us to a quite irrational sadness for days gone by. Such is Turner's poetry.