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4/3/2009

John Constable

National Portrait Gallery, London

John Constable (1776–1837) is celebrated as one of England’s greatest landscape artists but he also excelled in capturing likenesses and personalities. Spanning thirty years and featuring over fifty works, this exhibition will for the first time focus on his portraits and the insights they offer into Constable’s environment and influences.

Images of the artist himself are shown alongside paintings and drawings of friends and family, including touching and intimate portraits of his wife and children. To set the scene the works are interspersed with Constable’s beautiful landscape paintings of the areas surrounding his homes.

Constable’s commissioned work vividly depicts the provincial middle and upper classes including clergymen, landed gentry and families made wealthy through trade.

Direct and freshly observed, Constable’s portraits are unique in early nineteenth-century British art and collectively they provide a fascinating study of his life and work.

The Family at East Bergholt

John Constable was the second son of Golding Constable of East Bergholt, Suffolk, and his wife Ann (née Watts). His parents at first opposed their son’s unexpected ambition to become a landscape painter rather than go into the family grain business or the church. For many years, his progress as an artist was slow, and his income continued to come mainly from his father’s allowance.

Although he had rooms in London, the centre of the Georgian art world, Constable regularly returned to the family home for long periods until his marriage in 1816. East Bergholt, the surrounding countryside, and especially the vicinity of his father’s mill at Flatford, provided the subjects for many of Constable’s most important landscapes. And until his romance with his future wife, Maria Bicknell, the Constable family was the centre of his emotional world.

Friends & Early Group Portraits

Friendship was important in Constable’s life, and also in his portraiture. As a man he yearned for company of a specific kind: not the great social world, but a smaller circle of intimate friends that he slowly accumulated. His finest early portraits tend to show relations, or patrons with whom he was on a friendly footing such as Henry Greswold Lewis. In 1806 he produced a large number of informal sketches of people.

These lively vignettes of Georgian life are filled with careful observation and what looks very much like pleasure in the social scene. Constable had a sharp and humorous eye
for people. He was also of an age and a temperament to take an interest in attractive young women. But Constable’s women, even the prettiest of them, are not glamorised in the manner of society beauties by Reynolds or Lawrence. They are just themselves.

Romance & Marriage

Constable’s protracted courtship of his wife-to-be, Maria Bicknell, was complicated by her family’s opposition to the match. This hostility was largely on economic grounds: Constable was not earning enough as a painter to support himself – let alone a wife and children.

Maria’s father, Charles Bicknell, was a lawyer who worked extensively for the Prince Regent, among other clients. Her grandfather, Revd Dr Durand Rhudde, was rector of East Bergholt, and a man of property, who seems to have had some unspecified quarrel with the Constable family. Not unreasonably, neither Mr Bicknell nor Dr Rhudde thought an apparently unsuccessful landscape painter a suitable spouse for the delicate Maria, who was already showing signs of suffering from tuberculosis. Consequently, Constable’s wooing lasted for seven years, and during this period, Maria’s family made attempts to separate the lovers. They were eventually married in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, by Constable’s friend, the Revd John Fisher.

Family Life

The first phase of his marriage to Maria was Constable’s period of greatest contentment. In the house they rented in Keppel Street, Bloombury, he wrote to Fisher that he had passed ‘the five happiest & most interesting years of my life’, adding, ‘I got my children and my fame in that house, neither of which I would exchange with any other man’.

These were the years of the blissful sketches of Maria and the children in the garden at
Hampstead and indoors, perhaps at Keppel Street. After the mid-1820s, Constable’s family life began to darken as Maria’s illness became progressively worse. He was beset by anxieties about her health, the children’s frequent illnesses and the struggle to make sufficient income to support them all. Maria died in November 1828, leaving him the single parent of seven children. The loss clouded the remainder of Constable’s life, but his young family remained his greatest solace.

Mature Portraits

Immediately after his marriage, with a wife and, soon, a young family to support, Constable seems to have made the most determined effort of his career to make a living as a portrait painter. In the year 1818 he painted more portraits than in any other single year, and the best of these show a new richness and maturity of handling. After 1819, he enjoyed increasing success as a landscape painter and his surviving pictures of people become rarer.

However, he continued to produce remarkable portraits, especially of those he cared about. As a group, his sitters belonged to a different stratum of society from those of the leading portrait painters of the day, such as Thomas Lawrence. In general, Constable painted clergymen and their wives, landed gentry, lawyers and doctors: a world parallel to that of his almost exact contemporary, Jane Austen.

For all Press Office queries:
Neil Evans on +44 (0)20 73122452 nevans@npg.org.uk
Eleanor Macnair on +44 (0)20 73216620 emacnair@npg.org.uk
Helen Corcoran on +44 (0)20 73216610 hcorcoran@npg.org.uk

National Portrait Gallery
st Martin's Place - London
Opening hours
Daily 10.00 – 18.00
Closure commences at 17.50
Thursdays and Fridays until 21.00
Closure commences at 20.50
Last admission to the exhibition is 45 minutes before the Gallery closes.

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