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Hence the hundreds of studies of clouds and sky and rain squalls, the sifting of light down on Hampstead Heath, the endless particularations (never meant to be exhibited as final pictures) of small divisions of time, no two of which were the same. And hence, above all, the quality of Constable's mature work that seems so puzzlingly modern, a prediction of impressionism: the thick paint. By his late years he was piling it on with a palette knife in higher and higher tones, all the way up to pure flake white, in an effort to render the broken luminosity he saw in nature. There are moments when one feels the subject needs disinterring from the mass of pigment, but the expressive gains were sometimes enormous.
Never more so than in Hadleigh Castle, 1829. Constable brought to his view of the castle (which overlooks the Thames estuary) a pressure of melancholy: he was painting this desolate shore from memory, and his beloved wife Maria had just died of consumption. The paint is crusted, layer over layer, like mortar; even the grass and mallows in the foreground seem fossilized, and the broken tower—taller in art than in life—has an Ossianic misery to it. Then one's eye escapes to the horizon, glittering with scumbled white light, like a promise of resurrection. The whole image is as intense as anything in Turner: "melancholy grandeur," as Constable put it, the very essence of Romanticism and thus one of the key images of the English imagination. —By Robert Hughes