Constable Landscapes at National Gallery

Constable's giants

ROBERT ZALLER

The National Gallery’s Constable show, on view until December 31, is a revelatory look at one of one of the great and yet oft-dismissed landscape painters of the 19th Century. Often twinned to his disadvantage with J. M. W. Turner, his more sophisticated and more successful rival, Constable never painted the Alps or the splendors of Venice but stayed doggedly at home in his native Suffolk, making do with the flatlands of the Stour Valley, with its thatched cottages, shallow canals and hard-working boatmen.

It’s easy to settle for the picturesque with this material, and Constable doesn’t always resist the temptation. Certainly he can’t reach the Turnerian sublime. But there’s a dogged integrity about his work, splendid and sometimes very daring brushwork, and a robust and earthy palette. Turner is about the sunlight; Constable rests with the clouds. But what clouds they are!

Constable was born in 1776, one year Turner’s junior. His father wanted him to go into the family milling business, but instead of running it, he painted it. Constable was late in everything: late to begin a career, late to marry his childhood sweetheart, late to gain acceptance into the Royal Academy. He was about 40 when he finally hit his stride (at a time when the average life span was 45). His great fortune was to find everything he needed for his art in his immediate surroundings, and never to run out of fresh ways to depict them. A Constable is instantly recognizable, but no two are really alike.

The work he shouldn't have painted

Probably the one painting he should never have made is “The Hay Wain,” because it was so successful— perhaps his one unqualified commercial success— that it is the signature piece by which he is known, and which, after it was exhibited in Paris, deeply impressed French landscape painters from Delacroix to Courbet. It’s quite justifiably popular, of course, but it has put too many of his other masterpieces in the shade, and one of the present exhibit’s virtues is to place it among its peers.

Constable could paint on a very small and intimate scale: A memorable show of his very concentrated cloud studies— all dashed off in a burst of enthusiasm in the summer of 1822— was mounted at the Salander O’Reilly Gallery in New York in 2004. But “The Hay Wain” is large, and it is set among its fellow six-footers in majestic array.

That, however, isn’t the real coup of this exhibition, and the real revelation about Constable. Most painters, of course, do preparatory drawings and sketches, but Constable’s plein air oil sketches are as monumental as the finished canvases, which were worked up from them in the studio. The contemporary objection to Constable’s paintings was that they were a bit disheveled, for want of a better word, though it’s precisely this informality that has endeared them to later generations. But the sketches are completely unfettered; indeed, it’s almost as if Constable painted wilderness at the first go, and only then distilled it into landscape. The brushwork isn’t just striking but amazing, and if Turner is quite properly credited as the precursor of Impressionism and even of Abstract Expressionism, it is clear from these shaggy giants that Constable was equally ahead of his time. They surge with vision, and a vividness of line and color that is generally tamed and smoothed over in the finished product. Something is gained, of course, in form, balance, and harmony, but a dark, turbulent intensity is lost, and a sense— very much more modern— of nature as uncontrolled force and endlessly circulating energy.

Sketches or paintings?

A telltale comparison lies in the cloud formations that so obsessed Constable. In every instance, they are thicker, more unruly and more livid in the sketches than in the finished works; often they are downright apocalyptic, as if Satan and his rebel band might be tumbling out of them at any moment.

If only the sketches had survived rather than the finished works, Constable would be studied today as one of the dark geniuses of the 19th Century. This isn’t necessarily to prefer the former to the latter; their virtues are different, and, displayed as they are in Washington side by side, the sketches and paintings can be differently enjoyed. Take a look while you can, though; they have been brought together from a dozen collections and from private hands as well, and it may be many a year, if ever, that we’ll see them like this again.

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Let them eat landscapes

On the subject of the National Gallery, you can stroll over to the West Wing and see Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” the American landscape masterpiece lately spirited away from the New York Public Library by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton, who has just swooped down on “The Gross Clinic” by Philadelphia’s own Thomas Eakins. This modern Marie Antoinette wants to hang her bounty, sweated off the backs of Wal-Mart’s workforce, in Bentonville, Arkansas, just slightly west of Versailles. The National Gallery gets dibs in the deal too, and will have poor Tom, like a child in a custody suit, on alternating cycles of visitation.

Shame on all concerned. But, as I’ve said already, when money talks, art walks. And let’s not feel too badly for Philadelphia, which isn’t ashamed, after all, of trying to steal the entire Barnes Foundation collection for its own.