This study concentrates on the six foot canvases of the River Stour produced by Constable between 1819 and 1825 and examines the artist's development of this single thematic concept. Each work is shown beside its compositional sketch, illustrating his artistic process.

A fresh and lively biography of the revolutionary landscape painter John Constable. John Constable, who captured the landscapes and skies of southern England in a way never before seen on canvas, is beloved but little-understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of color. His landscapes show that he had sharp local knowledge of the environment. His skyscapes show a clarity of expression rarely seen in other artist's work. The figures within show an understanding of the human tides of his time. And his late paintings of Salisbury Cathedral show a rare ability to transform silent, suppressed passion into paint. Constable was also an active and energetic correspondent. His letters and diaries reveal a man of opinion, passion, and discord. His letters also reveal the lives and circumstances of his extended family who serve to define the social and economic landscape against which he can be most clearly seen. These multifaceted reflections draw a sharp picture of the person, as well as the painter. James Hamilton's biography reveals a complex and troubled man. Hamilton's portrait explodes previous mythologies about this timeless artist and establishes him in his proper context as a giant of European art.

Ray Lambert provides a close study of Constable's landscapes and his writings about them. Displaying a high level of engagement with ideas on art and aesthetics that had decisive consequences for his style of painting, Constable's texts clearly reveal and adumbrate his views. They also give an indication of the artist's knowledge of scientific, poetic, and aesthetic ideas that were relevant to the creation of a serious landscape art as well as a theory of landscape. Linking these theories with those of Joshua Reynolds, Lambert demonstrates that Constable was an intellectual painter whose works are not a revolutionary break with the past. Moreover, his theory and practice place him within the great tradition of landscape painting in the West.

John Constable is arguably the most accomplished painter of English skies and weather of all time. For Constable, the sky was the keynote, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment in a landscape painting. But how far did he understand the workings of the forces of nature which created his favourite cumulus clouds, portrayed in so many of his skies over the landscapes of Hampstead Heath, Salisbury and Suffolk? And were the skies he painted scientifically accurate? In this lucid and accessible study, John Thornes provides a meteorological framework for reading the skies of landscape art, compares Constable's skies to those produced by other artists from the middle ages to the nineteenth century, analyses Constable's own meteorological understanding, and examines the development of his painted skies. In so doing he provides fresh evidence to identify the year of painting of some of Constable's previously undated cloud studies.

On John Constable as a proto-abstractionist of pastoral landscape One of Britain's greatest landscape painters, John Constable was brought up in Dedham Vale, the valley of the River Stour in Suffolk. The eldest son of a wealthy mill owner, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1800 at the age of 24, and thereafter committed himself to painting nature out of doors. His "six-footers," such as The Hay Wainand The Leaping Horse, were designed to promote landscape as a subject and to stand out in the Academy's Annual Exhibition. Despite this, he sold few paintings in his lifetime and was elected a Royal Academician late in his career. With texts by leading authorities on the artist, this handsome book looks at the freedom of Constable's late works and records his enormous contribution to the English landscape tradition. John Constable(1776-1837) is one of Britain's best-known artists, and is often considered one of the greatest landscape painters of all time. He was born near the River Stour in Suffolk, an area the artist depicted so frequently that it is referred to as "Constable country." Pastoral scenes were unfashionable at the time and Constable struggled to establish himself as a painter. He was finally elected a Royal Academician in 1829, and in 1832, he exhibited The Opening of Waterloo Bridge--an effort 13 years in the making--at the Summer Exhibition.

Exploring the development, variety, and innovation of the landscape oil sketch, this book is generously illustrated with many masterpieces of 19th-century British landscape painting.