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Constable's Great Landscapes:

The Six-Foot Paintings

Feb. 3, 2007 - April 29, 2007

Seeing Through Constable

Conservation techniques and analysis can reveal surprising aspects of an artist's working methods, as seen in the x-ray of Constable's six-foot exhibition painting, View on the Stour near Dedham (no.39), 1822, from The Huntington collection.

The x-ray image documents some intriguing changes the artist made in the final canvas, even after he had worked up his full-scale oil sketch (no.38).  For example, in order to create a stronger focus Constable painted out the distracting foreground elements the x-ray reveals underneath the final paint layer, such as the gnarled tree trunk and the boys fishing.  He also added diagonal devices (a tilting spar, discarded rake, and abandoned boat), which emphatically direct our attention toward the center of the water, where we see two barges floating side by side.  Constable wrote of these and additional changes to his friend John Fisher, "The composition is almost totally changed from what you saw.  I have taken away the sail, and added another barge in the middle of the picture, with a principal figure, altered the group of trees, and made the bridge entire. The picture now has a rich centre..."  

In these alterations we see evidence that Constable continued to rethink the composition throughout the entire complex creative process he had developed to paint his monumental exhibition landscapes. 

An x-ray of the sketch for this finished painting, as well as of several others works on view, can be found in the accompanying catalogue of the exhibition.

Map of the area around Flatford Mill

Perhaps more than any other artist, Constable is associated with a specific geographical location, the Stour River valley in Suffolk, in southeast England.  Even today, the area is known as “Constable Country.”  His series of six-foot paintings of this region, on view in this exhibition, gain much of their emotive power from the artist’s deep connection to the place he painted.  The Stour valley “Six-Footers” illustrate the scenes of Constable’s childhood – his father’s mill, a neighbouring farmer’s house, the local church, a canal lock on the Stour River.  They are at once accurate renderings of natural phenomena and rural industry, and nostalgic recollections of a beloved landscape the artist, who was now settled permanently in London, no longer inhabited.

The map below shows the approximate position from which Constable’s pictures were painted in the area around Flatford Mill.  The numbers printed on the map refer to the numbers of the related paintings noted in the gallery labels and the accompanying catalogue. 

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