"Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings" The National Gallery of Art.(Exhibition note)(John Constable)

"Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings" The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. October 1, 2006-December 31, 2006

The large landscape paintings of John Constable, from The White Horse (1819) to the sketch for Stoke-by-Nayland (c. 1835-7), are among the most arresting landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, yet their importance has not not always been fully appreciated. The so-called "six-footers" (none is exactly that size) are currently the subject of a splendid exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, each painting shown alongside a full-size study, which exerts a particular power of its own. And therein, to an extent, lies the rub.

In their day, Constable's landscapes made, if not a splash, then at least a considerable ripple, when they were shown at the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions. The sheer size of the works was itself a bid to attract the eye of the Academy, claiming for landscape painting a grandeur of scale commonly reserved for the historical subjects then in vogue. None, however, was sufficient to propel Constable to the full-fledged membership in the Academy that he dearly sought, that is not until the late 1820s. Constable received more interest from France--not least from the dealer John Arrowsmith and, famously, from Delacroix--than from his native England. When he was finally elected to the Academy, he was in his early fifties. By comparison, his coeval J. M. W. Turner had become a full Academician twenty-seven years before. Turner's mythical resonance and historical themes appealed more to contemporary taste than Constable's paintings from observed nature, a subject that was seen as mundane.

In the twentieth century, the six-footers were beset by a different problem of taste. The critics Kenneth Clarke and Roger Fry proclaimed the sketches better than the finished paintings. This would have been quite a shock to Constable. Little known in the artist's day, the oil sketches were for the most part dispersed at a posthumous sale in 1838 and not seen again for decades, when they began to appear in shows in England.

As Charles Rhyne notes in the National Gallery's thorough, well-written catalogue, the wheels for this apparently modern take were put into motion by Charles Holmes in Constable and His Influence on Landscape Painting (1902). Holmes was the first to tout the "pictorial breadth and harmony" of the sketches over the detail-laden finished works. Fry, writing in Reflections on British Painting (1934), emphatically extended this claim for the sketches: Constable's Academy paintings, Fry argues,

 
   are almost always compromises with his real 
   idea. He watered that down, filling it out with 
   redundant statements of detail which merely 
   ...