GLEBE FARM, WITH THE TOWER OF LANGHAM CHURCH, BY CONSTABLE
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
John Constable
SIX
That the Metropolitan Museum should have so splendid an example of Constable’s style is most fortunate. For it is just the richness and glow of color that are seen in the “Glebe Farm” that make the “Cornfield,” the “Hay Wain” and the “Valley Farm” of the London National Gallery so supremely fine. While not so ambitious as these or the much larger “White Horse,” shown at the time the paintings of the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection were on exhibition, it is quite in the same class.
Constable’s struggle for recognition was long and arduous. After persistent opposition on the part of his fiancée’s family, he was married when forty years old. There followed twelve years of happiness; the death of his wife at the end of that time was a blow from which Constable never recovered. His election as an Academician came within three months of her death, but his reply to the announcement was, “It has been delayed until I am solitary and cannot impart it.”
Constable was born in Suffolk County, England, June 11, 1776, and lived to be sixty-one years of age. He became a student at the Royal Academy when he was twenty-three. Three years later he exhibited his first picture. Strangely enough, his work was appreciated in France before it won its way at home. He exerted a marked influence upon the rising school of French landscape painters. A medal was awarded him for pictures exhibited at the Salon in 1824, and the next year the “White Horse” won another for him at Lille. During the early years of his career, commissions for portraits were undertaken as a temporary relief to his finances. One of the best of these portraits hangs in the Hearn Collection at the Metropolitan Museum.
Constable’s pictures are very uneven in merit, but whether successful or not, there is always evident a sturdy love for nature and a faithful effort to record her moods. He never painted anything but his beloved England, and few of her artist-lovers have surpassed him in depicting her rural beauties. Many of his canvases are as glowing with color as a hillside after a shower. His compositions are seldom grandiloquent, as are some of Turner’s, but even Turner did not have a better eye for the dramatic placing of a thunder-cloud. Like Corot, Constable portrayed again and again a few scenes and localities that he knew thoroughly, painting first from one angle and then changing to a new point of view. The sincerity of the artist speaks from even the hastiest sketch. England no longer withholds her admiration for his work; his pictures now command the prices brought by “old masters.”
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 9. SERIAL No. 157
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.