Constable's Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons

As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable’s paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Author Susan Owens follows Constable's work and life through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist's year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure.

Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-­ builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable's life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk, England, and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs, and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labor and natural phenomena.

Though today he is often considered a traditional artist, in truth John Constable (1776–­1837) was a radical in his own time. His sketchbooks and paintings reject secondhand, slipshod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people, and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new kind of painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer's eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots.