\paperw4995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 English painter.\par
The son of a miller, he was raised in Suffolk on the banks of the river Stour, where he was born and spent most of hi
s life. In 1799 he went to London to attend courses at the Royal Academy, making a particularly keen study of classical landscape painters like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, as well as the seventeenth-century Dutch artists and, among British painte
rs, Richard Wilson and Thomas Gainsborough. In 1820, spurred on by his desire to break with the classical tradition and develop a new approach to landscape painting, he returned to his native village to paint nature from life with the aim of representing
it as objectively as possible. By doing this Constable took a decisive step toward a naturalistic depiction of the landscape, which would be taken further with the artists of the Barbizon School a few decades later.\par
From this moment on Constable de
voted himself assiduously to painting the English countryside, representing it as it appeared under different conditions of weather and light. In 1804 he started to paint in watercolor as well as oil, obtaining effects of great naturalness in his renderi
ng of atmospheric phenomena. In 1806 he went back to Suffolk, carrying on his intense activity of painting from life and making vain attempts to get his work recognized by the Royal Academy in London. He often painted pictures of the same places, returni
ng to a subject after many years. He produced numerous views of Hampstead Heath and Salisbury Cathedral (\i Salisbury Cathedral\i0 , 1820, London, National Gallery). His native Suffolk was a particularly fertile source of inspiration to which some of his
best paintings are devoted û \i Flatford Mill\i0 (1817, Tate Gallery), \i The Haywain\i0 (1821, London, National Gallery), \i Jumping Horse\i0 (1825, London, Royal Academy), or \i Dedham Vale\i0 (1802, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, replicated
in 1828, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland). These pictures were almost always the fruit of a long process of preparation, starting out with small sketches and moving on to full-scale ones before the careful execution of the painting itself. Betwee
n 1821 and 1822 he made a series of studies of clouds, noting the time and date of execution and, sometimes, the weather and wind conditions on the back of each. In 1828 Constable was at last admitted to the Royal Academy, but the death of his wife in th
e same year cast him into a state of deep depression from which he never fully recovered. The crisis he went through in the last years of his life is reflected in the dark tones of the works from that period (\i The Valley Farm\i0 , 1835, London, Tate Ga
llery). From 1833 onward Constable taught at the Royal Academy: the texts of the lectures he gave on the history of landscape painting are an invaluable aid to an understanding of his conception of the genre.\par
Unlike that of Joseph Mallord William Tu
rner, ConstableÆs work encountered resistance and perplexity in Britain. In France, however, it exercised a profound influence on EugΦne Delacroix and other Romantic artists, inducing them to paint in a freer manner, and was a fundamental point of refere
