At the Metropolitan, a retrospective of Constable's Arcadia
John Constable (1776-1837) remains the great example of the Englishness of English art. In his work even God is an Englishman. What other deity could have created those ripe interfolding fields, that mildly blowing air, that dewy sparkle on the face of a static world? Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what William Wordsworth did to it in verse: he threw out the allegorical fauna that had infested it since Milton and the rococo—nymphs, satyrs, dryads, Vergilian shepherds and Ovidian spring deities—and substituted Natural Vision for the Pathetic Fallacy.
Between them, Constable and J.M.W. Turner define the supreme achievements of landscape painting in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, but Constable was by temperament incapable of reaching for Turner's ever mutating rhetoric of sublime effects. His work was more staid, more modest, less conspicuously "inventive." Painting, he considered, was "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." From Nicholas Milliard's Elizabethan miniatures through Rupert Brooke's pastoral poetry, a deep love of the particulars of landscape, nose thrust in the hedgerow, has always been central to English culture. No wonder, then, that Constable's following is large and loyal. His landscape is just what the English feel nostalgic for as they dodge trucks on the bypass amid the billboards and concrete goosenecks. It is conservatism writ in leaves and wheat.
Constable has always had an American following too, but the exhibition of 64 of his paintings and oil sketches that went on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last week is the first such "retrospective" in the U.S. for 30 years. It is, necessarily, a modest affair compared with the immense Constable show at the Tate Gallery in 1976, which was the kind of exhibition that defines the image of an artist for a generation. Many favorites are not here, starting with The Hay Wain, the most reproduced landscape in English painting—a sort of vegetative Mona Lisa. But the show was curated by the world's leading Constable specialist, Graham Reynolds, formerly of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and it serves as a delightful refresher course for those who know Constable and a brilliant introduction for those who do not.
Peace, security, the untroubled enjoyment of unproblematic Nature: such is the main motif of Constable's work. One might suppose that it would have made him popular in his lifetime, but English connoisseurs were far more receptive to Turner, the romantic with wider moods and more liberal feelings. An archconservative who longed for institutional acceptance but was denied it most of his life—he was not elected to the Royal Academy until age 52, and even then he had the humiliation of seeing his first entry as a member to its annual show rejected by his colleagues—Constable did not have the knack of getting on with clients or fellow artists. He was timid, prickly, complacent and sardonic by turns. "Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration?' exclaimed William Blake over one of his tree studies. "I never knew it before," Constable snapped. "I meant it for drawing."