Constable, John (1776–1837)

Abstract

John Constable was born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a miller. He showed early promise as a painter of local landscape, and was encouraged as a young man by Sir George Beaumont, the wealthy patron and connoisseur. He was enrolled as a student in the Royal Academy in February 1799, and first exhibited in 1802; it was in this year that he told his friend John Dunthorne, ‘there is room enough for a natural painter’ (C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, 1845, ed. J. Mayne, 1951, p. 15). It was part of every painter’s education, in the days of the picturesque, to experience a mountainous countryside: Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts, therefore arranged for him to visit the Lake District in 1806. Although he did some painting there, he did not feel at home in the landscape: he told his biographer, C. R. Leslie, that ‘the solitude of mountains oppressed his spirits’ (Memoirs, p. 18). In succeeding years Constable continued to persevere in his own particular branch of landscape art, finding encouragement from friends and from the occasional patron such as John Fisher, later Archdeacon of Salisbury. Constable survived during those years by painting portraits and other occasional commissions, but his landscape work did not receive much general recognition.