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Before you read

Discuss these questions:

1) In your opinion in which genres did the famous English painters distinguish themselves most of all?

2) If you had a chance to spend some time as an apprentice painter, which country would you prefer, England or France? Give your reasons.

XIXth century art cannot be fully understood or appreciated unless account is taken of certain fundamental artists, Constable among them. Besides being the chief exponent of the type of painting known as “picturesque”, he was responsible for removing the deeply rooted prejudice which insisted that the function of art was to represent man, since by its nature art was “the work of man”. Constable chose instead to devote himself to landscape painting, almost to the exclusion of all other forms of art, and it was in landscape that he sought the values of man.

English landscape painting of the period immediately preceding Constable was not the best basis for the development of the art. The artist background against which Constable’s art came to maturity was that of XVIIIth century England: influenced by Italian, Flemish and Dutch traditions and modeling itself on Salvator Rosa for dramatic landscape, Claude for an idyllic view of nature, Poussin for classical and ‘sublime’ view, and to a certain extent also on the Itallian scenic paintings of Canaletto.

In his approach to natural reality Constable was not so much concerned to achieve knowledge through nature as to discover and get to know nature itself, for what it is and what it can give and teach. This humble attitude caused him to make a close and analytical study of nature throughout his life.

From a close observation of certain landscape paintings, composed of barely sketched-in irregular elements of great liveliness and variety, and from a study of the Italian school (especially Titian) a further category, the picturesque, was determined to play a pre-eminent part in the history of English painting. This category was mainly founded on a concept of natural “beauty” as it had already been celebrated in the art of the past (by Venetian and baroque painting) and was to become a vehicle and source of inspiration for new visual concepts.

It is undoubtedly from the concept of “picturesque” that landscape painting in general came into being, the picturesque acting as a projection on to nature of the idea of the beautiful. And as Constable was a master of landscape art, his especially a picturesque form of painting; although in this picturesque art he never permits himself any indulgence in decorativeness or in arbitrary and dilettantish effects, and avoids the stylistic exaggerations to which such a concept of art might easily lead. His painting was of an extreme moral rigour, holding firmly to act, and entirely devoted to the study of truth and nature. One may therefore rightly say that it is in the art of Constable that the picturesque returns to its original sources, to Titian and Venetian scenic painting: in other words, it becomes pictorial.

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