Reynolds, Graham, "Constable's England"
Metropolitan | 1983 | English | PDF | 184 pages | 20.75 Mb

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings 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".

In Constable’s time England was divided into thirty-nine counties. Constable set foot in just over half of them; he never crossed the borders into Wales or Scotland, still less did he travel out of the country, even when his pictures were creating a furor in Paris in 1824. The scenes that enter significantly into his painting are drawn from an even more restricted area: the six counties of Suffolk, Essex, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Sussex. Geographically, “Constable’s England” is a severely limited concept. In his concentration on a small number of places studied over and over again Constable presents a sharp contrast with his great contemporary Turner, who took not only England, Scotland, and Wales but also the whole of accessible Europe as his province.