John Constable

John Constable (June 11th 1776 with East Bergholt, Suffolk - March 31st 1837 with London), is a painter British Paysagiste of the 19th century.

The area of Dedham Vale in Suffolk is still known like the “country of Constable”. Flatford Millet, the subject of the one of its works most known was with his/her father, a brewer with the flourishing businesses.

It fell in love with a woman from the surroundings, Maria Bicknell, and became acquainted with his father, a close relation of king de Grande-Bretagne, who did not find Constable rather gifted. After five years, it gave finally its assent to their union and the wedding take place in 1816. After having given rise to seven children, Maria died of Tuberculose, which upset her husband durably.

Its ciels is particularly vibrating and make of it a precursor of the Impressionnisme.

Specialist in the ciels, it studies them like “most imperceptible of the phenomena of the world” and seeks “to determine informs it”. According to him, “painting is a science, and it should be a constant research of the natural laws. And why not regard the painting of the landscapes as one of the branches of the philosophy of the nature, whose experiments would not be other than tables? ”. We would call today “physical” what it names “philosophy of nature”, but this quotation shows well the optics in which Constable was: it created with others an artistic tradition which regards the history of the artistic development as representative a continuous progress in the direction of the exactitude of the vision.

Its method is simple: it leaves in strolls to paint nature itself. And although it received an important formation by the study of pictorial art and its techniques, it regards that as a truth of second hand: “Each time I prepare to make a draft according to nature, I endeavor to forget that I ever could see a table”.

He thus claims to make technical discoveries by the observation and the continual experimentation. According to him, to paint is a transposition, not a copy, and must preserve the reports/ratios of units. Thus Constable was detached from the traditional subjects while going to paint nature itself in its experimental concern: the concern of the technical development modifies the goal of art, and gradually the model of description will replace that of the narration in painting.

The Flemish painters of the time, like the British painters, will also contribute them to this upheaval: the vision is only one duplication of the world. One can also note that the birth of this esthetics is contemporary work of optics of the physicists Huygens, Kepler, invention of the Camera will obscura: the formulated principle is that the objects project themselves their image on a surface, just as they project it on the retina. The object is given then like autonomous: from where impression that there is nothing to say of it, and that is not told.

In 1824, the living room of Paris exposed some of works of Constable. Thus Constable influenced Millet and the painters of the school of Barbizon.

primary source: Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion .

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