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  • John Constable
    Jun 11, 1776 - Mar 31, 1837
  • Cottages at East Bergholt, Suffolk - John Constable RA was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
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Cottages at East Bergholt, Suffolk
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  • Cottages at East Bergholt, Suffolk

  • John Constable
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  • This charming plein-air sketch depicts a row of cottages along a lane on the edge of the village of East Bergholt. The work dates to circa 1809–11, a period when Constable seems to have taken up on-the-spot outdoor oil sketching in earnest. The handling bears all the characteristic hallmarks of Constable’s early sketching style; with rather even, relatively smooth brushwork and strong tonal contrasts. The thick and distinctive brush line marking the edges of the roofs on the cottage to the right is particularly characteristic of his work at this period.

    "I should paint my own places best – They made me a painter..."

    East Bergholt, a village on the banks of the River Stour in Dedham Vale, on the border between Suffolk and Essex, was where Constable was born and brought up. His parents, Golding and Ann Constable, lived in a substantial mansion there and owned 93 acres of arable land around the village, which the family farmed. Golding was also a prosperous miller and successful businessman. He owned watermills at Flatford and Dedham, as well as a windmill on East Bergholt Heath, and he traded corn and coal out of Mistley Wharf on the North Essex coast. He also owned a coal yard at Brantham and served as one of the Commissioners of the River Stour Navigation.

    The Constables' social position, and the fact that his father owned a large portion of it, gave the young artist unfettered access to much of the land around his childhood home, and an intimate knowledge of its gently rolling hills, picturesque villages, green riverbanks and luxuriant meadows. It was this visual reservoir, accumulated during the halcyon days of his childhood, which would not only inspire Constable’s earliest endeavours in paint but provided him with much of the raw materials for many of his greatest paintings. It is today an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, largely unchanged since Constable's day.

    The painting previously belonged to Cecil Eldred Hughes, a noted collector and scholar of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British art. He authored several books, including Early English Watercolour, published by Methuen and Co. in 1929, owned at least one pencil drawing by Turner now in the British Museum (ref. no. 1946.1030.1) and a watercolour by Francis Towne that was much admired by Paul Oppe, and was an amateur artist himself – a black chalk and watercolour view of the Villa Medici and St. Trinità de'Monti in Rome by him is in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (inv. no. E574-1941).

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Other paintings by John Constable:

Coast Scene with Breaking Cloud Sun
Coast Scene with Breaking Cloud Sun
Cottage, Rainbow, Mill
Cottage, Rainbow, Mill
Dedham Church and Vale
Dedham Church and Vale
Dedham from Langham
Dedham from Langham
John ConstableJohn Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was mentally handicapped and so John was expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham. Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.

In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk countryside that was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things." He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.

In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue art, and Golding even granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections as well as studying and copying Old Masters. Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael. He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist. By 1803, he was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy.

In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College, a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter:
"For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performances look like the work of other men... There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth."

His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain. Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins. He did, however, make occasional trips further afield. For example, in 1803 he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman ship Coutts as it visited south-east coastal ports, and in 1806 he undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District. But he told his friend and biographer Charles Leslie that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits; Leslie went on to write:
"His nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human associations. He required villages, churches, farmhouses and cottages."