All art treasures are prone to fabled accounts, none more pertinent to Anglo-French artistic relations of the 1820s than Constable's The Hay Wain. It is a familiar axiom, repeated incessantly, that ...after its prominent exhibition in Paris in the Salon of 1824, the so-called 'Salon anglais', the work became entrenched in art-historical lore as a singular icon that transformed French artistic sensibilities in landscape depiction, much to the regret of Ruskin. The influence that Constable's works in the exhibition had on French painters was noted for decades and was most emphatically expressed by the anglophile critic Ernest Chesneau, who paid homage specifically to The Hay Wain when he affirmed that the painting 'firent en France un effet extraordinaire' and that 'notre grande ecole de paysage modern se rattache directement a lui Constable'.
C. R. Leslie's influential biography of John Constable highlighted that his friend's artistic strengths stemmed from his unprecedented geographical "confinement." The unpublished draft preface, ...however, compared Constable with a "voyage of discovery." Attending to Leslie's conflicting images of confinement and remoteness enriches our understanding of how Constable's rhetorical preoccupation with the local was a response to his place within expanding global artistic, social, and economic networks. His conception of the English landscape was constructed against a background of exploration, colonization, and international commercial expansion, the negotiation of these realities animating his paintings, prints, and public theorizing.
Raman has long been established as a nondestructive and noninvasive technique that has found increasing application in the area of cultural heritage and the study of works of art. Here, we present a ...further application of Raman spectroscopy in the study of an oil painting belonging to the de Brécy Trust. In the work presented, Raman microscopy has been employed to spectroscopically study minute fragments of excised pigments from a small oil painting bearing the hallmarks of a study sketch by the famous English landscape artist John Constable. Raman spectra were collected from 18 discrete areas of the work, chosen due to their colour in order to potentially cover all of the pigments used in this work. Of the 18, six positive identifications were made, confirming that the painting contained pigments and minerals known to be favoured by the artist. Whilst the remaining 12 sample sites were complicated by the fluorescence effects observed from the applied varnish, this can be useful in providing evidence to support the application of the ‘scumbling’ technique known to be favoured by Constable. We have positively identified the pigments: ultramarine/lapis lazuli, lead white, red lead, Prussian blue, chrome yellow and ivory black. We have also identified amorphous carbon and gypsum. These positively identified pigments link into Constable's existing colour box and four palettes, providing evidence that could lead to the painting being attributed to Constable.
Excised fragments of paint and varnish from a purported John Constable painting have been examined using Raman spectroscopy in order to identify the pigments used and their relation to John Constable's colour palette. This work identifies some of the pigments used in this painting and confirms their link to Constable's palette. Further evidence of degraded varnish provides evidence of a technique called scumbling, a technique used in Constable's early career. This work demonstrates the powerful ability of Raman to offer key evidence for the provenance of artworks.
Constable Venning, Barry
2015., 2015, 2015-08-21
eBook
John Constable (1776-1837) is arguably the best-loved of English artists; his fame and popularity are rivalled only by those of his great contemporary, J.M.W. Turner. But like Turner, his reputation ...rests on a handful of very well-known paintings, normally Suffolk scenes such as Flatford Mill or Hay-Wain. Many of the magisterial productions of his last years, including Hadleigh Castle and The Opening of the Waterloo Bridge are a far cry from the Suffolk scenes, whilst his accomplishments within the difficult and competitive genre of marine painting have been consistently undervalued. Barry Venning's introduction considers Constable's background, his family life, his education, and the early friendships from which he drew patronage, support, and advice. He discusses the artist's relationship with the great tradition of European landscape painting and examines the historical and cultural context within which Constable lived and worked.
In early nineteenth-century Britain, the painter John Constable and meteorologist Luke Howard experimented with new aesthetic forms in response to the challenges climate posed to representation. In ...landscape paintings, sketches, tables, and graphs, the artist and scientist grappled with climate's temporal scale, which extended beyond the domain of immediate "feeling" associated with landscape representation. Their efforts to construct a stable representation of England's climate took shape against the polluted atmosphere of industrial, imperial London, and in tandem with the modern state's disciplinary visuality. In their work, an aesthetics of climate emerged that was responsive to an environment increasingly known through numeric data and abstraction.
John Constable's cloud studies perfectly demonstrate the epistemological concerns of nineteenth-century Realism. Constable noted location, time, and meteorological conditions on many of his studies. ...The cloud studies' basis in the direct observation of specific clouds is irrefutable. Yet, the very nature of clouds makes the exercise of painting them faithfully from nature impossible. An intriguing (and contested) explanation for the striking naturalism of Constable's clouds was put forward by Kurt Badt in his 1950 book, John Constable's Clouds. If computer vision can point toward avenues for further inquiry - in this case, ongoing transnational research on European art around 1800 and a reconsideration of Constable not just as a precursor to modernism and impressionism but as a culminating painter of the eighteenth century - its use as a complement to existing techniques of art historical analysis has arrived.
Wien shows how 19th-century painter John Constable used theories of visual perspective alongside mechanisms such as the drawing frame to produce compositions that revealed his understanding of the ...geometry of vision and the dynamics of visual perception. After Constable was accepted as a painting student at the Royal Academy in 1799, he adhered to conventional uses of perspective. However, Arthur Parsey suggests that he regretted this in retrospect, presuming that Constable was not aware of the principle behind his framed glass panel during the period in which he used it.
The Englishness of Randolph Stow Richards, Fiona
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL,
10/2014, Volume:
14, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The second song, 'Green mooned the white lady,' is a ballad in four rhyming strophes, much distorted in the music, in which we are given a hint of the later significance of the colours green and ...white to Stow: Green mooned the white lady of silvered Sydney town -O, stately as a candle-end, all in her winding-gown; apple-pale and like a spider's egg her dainty muslin face and her moonstones new polished with a moon-clout of lace. Stow worked on the new novel in 1983, finishing it despite the distractions of an excellent spring: 'the sun is pouring in the window of my top room, and birds are chirruping away. . . it's distracting me rather from my book-it suits me best to work while the nights are long and cold and dark, and I had hoped to have it finished, or nearly, by now (Letter to mother, 28 April 1983). There are links with Stow's former home towns of Fremantle and Geraldton; the Western Australian and Essex towns saw huge cargo vessels in a working port, and Harwich's lighthouse out at sea was an English version of Fremantle's lighthouse. Stow had an excellent ear for languages, and had begun his researches into the Suffolk dialect by working in the local pub some ten years earlier (Letter to mother, 20 Aug 1973). ...Harry speaks in a distinctive local dialect, the particular words that Stow creates meticulously preserved across the novel, for example: whass what's hooman human redooce reduce goo go knoo know hoom home stoodent student The Suburbs of Hell was shortlisted for East Anglian book of the year in 1984, the prizegiving event aptly held in a literary Suffolk venue, the Angel hotel in Bury St Edmunds, where Dickens's Mr Pickwick stayed.
Pictures by John Constable and J.M.W. Turner hung side by side in the Royal Academy in 1831, an arrangement orchestrated by Constable himself. Taking a chronological and historiographic approach, and ...drawing mainly on contemporary sources, this paper discusses the background to this highly significant event and its impact on the artists' future standing in British art history.
This paper examines the re-framing of John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831. It explores the decision made by Tate conservators to remove ...the old but unoriginal frame and to manufacture a new frame through re-creative processes. This intervention sought to enhance the viewing of the painting while simultaneously adding contextual value and historical resonance.
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