John Constable

Not every smaller detail is a secret, though.

Take John Constable's The Hay Wain.

Most of us recognize the wagon, the river, the trees, but start looking beyond the main subject and the painting becomes much busier.

There are people working in the distance, a fisherman near a boat, a woman collecting water.

Mm

... balanced and soothing and, you know, taking his cue from Constable, who of course-

Mm

... um, grew up and painted just here.

Well, we're almost looking at Constable scenery-

Yeah

... over the hill here, aren't we?

Absolutely, yeah.

But although our Ordnance Survey maps rely on his work, our mental picture of the countryside of the past relies on a very different worst job.

[gentle music] John Constable is the quintessential painter of the countryside.

Today, pictures like this can seem charged with chocolate box nostalgia, but in his day, Constable was seen as daringly new.

What was so revolutionary was the clouds, which he painted with meteorological accuracy, and the white flecks he used to render the shifting flicker of light and weather on leaves.

Contemporaries found this unique way of using white paint so startling that they contemptuously referred to it as Constable's snow.

And this snow, as well as things like glazed pots and even makeup, required a lead white paint maker prepared to dedicate himself to hours of painstaking and highly toxic work.

What are we doing here?

Which famous artist made this artwork shown here? Is it Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W.

Turner or John Constable? I correct if you said J.M.W.

Turner.

44.

by itself genuine naples yellow is exceedingly permanent to light and when used alone and varnished is not affected by gases of any kind as evidence of this it is practically unchanged in all old paintings with the exception of perhaps The seventeenth-century pictures and older productions show a slight deepening, which may have been caused by the action of gases where the pigment was unprotected.

In Constable's pictures of his later periods, he evidently used Naples yellow unmixed, and apparently put it on with the aid of a knife.

These pictures of Constable's only show a very slight deepening.

Read by Bryn Roberts, King's Winford, February 2024.

Section 20 of How to Paint Permanent Pictures by Maximilian Totsch.

by itself genuine naples yellow is exceedingly permanent to light and when used alone and varnished is not affected by gases of any kind as evidence of this it is practically unchanged in all old paintings with the exception of, perhaps, the seventeenth-century pictures, and older productions show a slight deepening, which may have been caused by the action of gases where the pigment was unprotected.

In Constable's pictures of his later periods, he evidently used Naples yellow unmixed, and apparently put it on with the aid of a knife.

These pictures of Constable's only show a very slight deepening.

Read by Bryn Roberts, King's Winford, February 2024.

Section 20 of How to Paint Permanent Pictures by Maximilian Totsch.

People like we see here.

John Constable started to become powerful landscape painters, people like Turner.

And Britain started to become a place of interest for the French.

And artists started to cross the channel, like pilgrims.

In 1824, at the Paris Salon, a group of British painters travelled across the channel to Paris and exhibited their work.

And among them, was the shy and stubborn man from Suffolk, John Constable.

And his paintings caused an absolute scandal and revelation in Paris at the time.

The French had never seen anything like it.