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.

An invaluable memoir of the great British 19th-century landscape painter.

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.