Early nineteenth-century London boasted a robust selection of displays, of art and otherwise, which made up a larger ecosystem of exhibitions. Participants in this ecosystem, including exhibition ...organizers, practitioners, and viewers, were at once mutually supporting and fiercely competitive. Artists banded together in group exhibitions, where many of them hoped to steal the show. Exhibition societies clustered together, benefiting from proximity even as they contended for visitors. Exhibitions and their objects were not consumed in isolation; rather, both the crowded walls of these displays and the busy itineraries of their viewers encouraged comparative viewing. Considering the display history of works by Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Constable, William Hilton, William Etty, John Martin, and Margaret Carpenter, this essay demonstrates how exhibition histories can shed fresh light on nineteenth-century art: first, by providing a new model for interactions among elements of the art world; and second, by uncovering works and artists who are rarely studied today but were vital participants in the ecosystem of exhibitions in their own day.
Water, in its various forms--from rivers to clouds, and amphibious sites, from marshes to meadows--has long been an integral, perhaps characteristic presence in the landscape arts in Britain. ...Currently, water is emerging as a key element in a wider art practice and environmental imagination. This paper considers the presence of a particular, if overlooked, water feature, the pond, in the work of two artists: one contemporary and the other a historical English landscape artist, both of whom are attentive to a range of hydrologies. The first part considers the place of water in the “landscape stories” of the contemporary photographer Jem Southam, and the series on the pond at Upton Pyne in Devon. The second part addresses the “natural history” of John Constable’s watery landscapes, and focuses on the place of Branch Hill Pond in his pictures of Hampstead Heath. The works of both artists may be located in a long-standing topographical tradition.
This article explores the place of urban subjects in works by the nineteenth-century artist John Constable, who is generally known for his rural scenes, and by John Britton, a leading topographical ...author and publisher of the time. It examines Constable and Britton's approaches to urban history through their best-known publications, their lectures and their correspondence, focusing especially on the centrality of religious and political reform to their representations of the cathedral city of Salisbury.
This paper revisits a familiar episode in accounts of John Constable's career -- his reception and legacy in France. Paul Huet has been widely acknowledged as Constable's closest French follower, but ...this paper moves beyond the usual chronological connections between British and French landscape painting to consider Huet's mid-nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in the English artist. One of Huet's most ambitious paintings, The Flood at Saint-Cloud exhibited 1855, is here presented as the overlooked centrepiece of this revival.
On Aug 9, 1829, a crate arrived at Leydenhall, the home of the Archdeacon of Salisbury, John Fisher. The crate contained a painting by John Constable. Fisher and Constable had been close friends for ...years. Obviously the painting Constable sent to the Fishers was an important work. As we see, Fisher described the picture, in the phrase beginning 'Your case containing the', not in words but with a rebus, which was evidently designed to serve as his personal comment on the work, and thus should have served as a means of identifying the picture. Fisher clearly associated the picture with Constable's new position, but why would he have drawn this rebus in reference to the painting in question? To answer this we have to examine the year 1829 from the perspective of John Constable's career.
John Constable painted Hadleigh Castle in the months that followed the death of his wife, Maria, in late 1828. Whereas interpretations of this bleak masterpiece frequently stress its melancholic ...introspection, this article suggests that it can also be understood as fundamentally engaged with scientific ideas. Across the canvas, light and vapour interweave, drawing together globe and sky into a single system of interchanging states that corresponds with understandings of the world arising in contemporary geology and meteorology. This dynamism linking every aspect of the landscape is reinforced by Constable’s innovative paint handling, which can profitably be considered in relation to conceptions of electrical charge and polarity then stimulating British intellectual life. Viewed in the light of early nineteenth-century science, Hadleigh Castle emerges from the depths of Constable’s mourning as a profound pictorial engagement with newly-conceived qualities of nature, through which the artist traced the invisible but universal conditions of life.
The idea of mannerism, contextualized in the historical period that goes from the late 16th to the 19th century, raises a series of theoretical questions that are relevant to art in general, and in ...particular to contemporary art. Style and manner are coterminous with art itself. Here, Cast examines the notion that artists promote a consistent trait, indeed a stylistic mannerism that becomes synonymous of uniqueness, originality, and creativity.
The River After Constable Brown, Devin
Anglican theological review,
10/2009, Volume:
91, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
... if you were to visit the National Gallery and see his famous Hay Wain, the whites and grays whirling through the clouds, each leaf tipped with gold from an unseen sun, the earth and sky mirrored ...and transformed in the ripples below. you would understand the work of an artist to wipe the film of the familiar from the glass of the world.
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