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This is the landscape of touch. In Hadleigh Castle, c. 1829—a gloomy ruin at the mouth of the Thames, painted around the time of his wife's death from consumption—Constable's tactility reaches its extreme. A cowherd and his collie are encrusted blobs, identical in substance to the rocks, the ruin, the clouds; liquid or scumbled, the tossing white brush marks in the sky have a resolutely material quality for which there were no parallels in European painting.
He was, in short, an intensely specific artist. Specificity did not come easily, for any landscapist practicing around 1800 faced a battery of required stereotypes—chiefly the pastoral landscape with framing trees and unified brown tone, in the manner of Claude or Gaspard Poussin. Time and again, we see Constable glancing at the formula, using it, sheering off. He writes in 1803, the year of his Royal Academy debut: "I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand . . I shall shortly return to Bergholt where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected representation of the scenes ..."
This was not a simple process, and one would caricature Constable's achievement by treating it as a linear journey from style to reality. What he knew of art constantly modified what he saw in nature. But the balance he struck between these terms, in his fin est paintings, was quite new. Only the gentleness of the subjects — those mellow distances which, a century and a half later, seem like the never-never land of Arcady — veils it from us. It amounted to a prediction of impressionism, 40 years ahead. It was an attempt, as Constable put it, "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the Chiaroscuro in Nature, to shew its effect in the most striking manner, to give 'to one brief moment, caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence ..."
From then on Constable became immersed in small divisions of time: in mo ments no two of which were the same.
Hence his sheaves of cloud studies, done from observations on Hampstead Heath. He did not use the broken col ors and blue shadows which, after a century of impressionism, we still imagine as necessary for telling a truth about light. A work like Dedham Lock and Mill, c. 1819, is straight tonal painting.
Yet it would be hard to imagine a more succinctly truthful rendering of light on water and young grass. Here, Constable's "scientific" or descriptive impulse joins with the aesthetic in a moment of pragmatic freshness: not much painting looks as modern in 1976 as this must have looked in 1819.
Virginal and Dense. But for all that, Constable still wanted to paint landscapes like an old master in the line of Gainsborough, Ruysdael and Rubens.