Under The Same Sky: John Constable

'Bring me my umbrella! I’m going to look at Mr Constable’s picture.’ This sally by John Constable’s fellow artist Henry Fuseli is recorded in various forms – sometimes it is his umbrella he calls for, sometimes his greatcoat – strongly suggesting he used the line more than once. Like the best standing jokes, it contained a large measure of truth: by the 1820s, Constable was well known for making the weather feel vividly present in his paintings. In 1825 a Hampstead neighbour, the actor Jack Bannister, was keen to buy a picture and described what he wanted not in terms of subject but of effect. ‘He has long desired one of me’, Constable relayed to a friend, ‘in which, he says, he can feel the wind blowing on his face.’ A Boat Passing a Lock 1826 is just this kind of picture. Manoeuvrings of lock mechanism and barge are put in their prosaic place by the cosmic spectacle of sun rays battling against cascading, bruise-grey clouds: it is an opera pitched against a folk song.

Constable knew more about the weather than most landscape painters of his generation. His father, Golding Constable, was a wealthy Suffolk miller, the owner of a windmill, two watermills and a complementary transport business that carried his flour up the Thames Estuary to be sold in London. When John left school at 16, Golding put him to work in the windmill on East Bergholt Common. His son marked the year he spent there by incising his name, the date 1792, and a picture of a windmill on the structure’s wooden interior – though whether this signalled a commitment to windmills or to depictions of them is a moot point. All his life his parents’ house had rung with discussions of the wind and the weather and what they meant for the day’s work. Even so, the young Constable had had to learn, and quickly, how to master this vast, resonant mill – an incorrectly angled sail could tear disastrously.

Because of this family background, Constable understood the landscape and its weather from the inside, seeing it with a miller’s eye and feeling it beneath the soles of his boots. He may not have travelled as extensively as many of his landscape-painter contemporaries, who typically made sketching tours in the summer in order to gather material for the following year’s exhibition pictures. Few artists, in fact, travelled less. But he made up for it with an easy, physical familiarity with the natural world that allowed him to get close enough to survey it from odd angles: one friend remembered his habit of lying down under trees to study how the leaves and branches moved in the breeze. Constable began to make vivid oil sketches to record these corners of his local landscape as they were transformed minute by minute by changing light: strong sun casting deep shadows over a lane; trees reflected in the still surface of the River Stour; dawn breaking behind the yews in the vicarage garden; the sun setting over his beloved Dedham Vale. For Constable, light and weather were as integral to the landscape as a tree or a river.

Like that of every other professional artist of his day, Constable’s working year was dominated by the Royal Academy exhibition, and the fixed point of its annual opening on the first Monday in May. Until he was 40, when he married, he would typically spend the summer and early autumn at his family home in East Bergholt, returning to London in October or early November with brimming portfolios and sketchbooks stowed in his luggage. This was the beginning of what he called his ‘winter’s campaign’ at the easel, when he worked on the pictures that had to be ready to submit to the Academy in the spring. Trying to evoke the feeling of a summer’s day in the wintry light of his painting room was not easy; in the earliest weeks of 1801, his second London winter, he complained to a friend back in East Bergholt: ‘I paint by all the daylight we have, and that is little enough ... I sometimes however see the sky, but imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.’ Years later, in 1814, he was still struggling to bring warmth to a painting of a green valley, based on a pencil sketch he had made the previous July: ‘it is bleak and looks as if there would be a shower of sleet’, he moaned. So, later that year he began an experiment: rather than making sketches outdoors then retreating into his painting room to work on the composition itself, when working on Boat-Building near Flatford Mill 1815 he took easel, canvas and sketching stool down the lane to Flatford, where his father had a dry dock, and sat down to paint in the open air. As the sunlight reflected on the leaves of a willow stirring in the breeze, and flickered on the ripples on the river’s surface, he recorded all the fresh vitality sparkling in front of him with dabs of pale paint against his subtle shades of green. He was catching nature on the move: not as it looked through the conventional artistic filters of his time, but as it struck his eye.

Few men are prophets in their own country, however, and it was hard for Constable’s contemporaries to appreciate what he was doing. Compared to that of other artists, his work could look unfinished and those white dabs distractingly spotty. Constable’s ‘snow’ became a favourite jibe of critics who objected to his expressive handling of paint in scenes that clearly represented high summer. On one occasion the misunderstanding was genuine; an elderly attendant at the Royal Academy once congratulated him on a summery exhibit: ‘That’s a good picture, sir; so natural, all the frost on the trees.’ The last picture Constable painted at least partly out of doors was Flatford Mill: Scene on a Navigable River, which he was racing to finish before his wedding, a month later in October 1816. That time, the seasons really were topsy-turvy: this was the ‘year without summer’, a consequence of the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, which had a devastating effect on the global climate. ‘I think you must find it very cold being so much in the open air’, worried Constable’s fiancée, Maria Bicknell, on 5 September. In the field on the right are heaps of cut hay waiting to be carted off, which, in a normal year, would have been done in July.

After the couple’s marriage they settled in London and Constable returned to painting in the studio; the vivid, on-the-spot oil sketches that told him about sunlight, shadow, weather and season now became more vital to him than ever. In 1819 the Constables first took lodgings in semi-rural Hampstead for the autumn. Constable loved it because it allowed him to ‘see nature – & unite a town & country life’. What soon caught his eye was the quality of light: standing on the highest point on the heath, he painted Branch Hill Pond under an overcast sky, sunlight breaking through in dramatic shafts. In 1820 he began to paint the sky itself – that autumn he was busy in central London, usually only reaching Hampstead towards sunset. During the following two years, however, he made the heath his cloud-viewing platform in an intensive and astonishingly productive campaign of sky-watching during the summer and autumn months – he preferred September and October, as they brought a ‘peculiar tone and beauty’ to the skies. Because Constable added notes on weather conditions, dates and even precise times of day to many of his sky sketches, they can be read like the pages of a diary. At first he included foliage at the bottom of each study, fascinated as ever by the relation- ship between sky and ground and the way sunlight danced over leaves. Later, however, he turned his gaze upwards, letting the land drop away, creating an unprecedented group of near-abstract cloud pictures of astonishing depth and detail. Immersion in this new element changed him as well as his art: ‘I am the man of clouds’, he announced to a friend.

Brighton, with its blustery microclimate, could put on an even more dramatic show. The family often stayed there for the sake of Maria’s health, but Constable was exasperated by the town’s frivolity, calling it ‘the receptacle of fashion and offscouring of London’. And yet he soon grew to relish its dramatic storms and turbulent seas: he was one of the few visitors who did not welcome a cloudless sky. Among the very first oil sketches he made in Brighton is one that shows two women battling their way along the shingle, bent over as they brace themselves against the gale under clouds almost purple with an imminent squall. ‘June 12 1824 / taking the air’ was the comment he wrote on the back: you can almost hear his wry chuckle. Another day, seeing the sky turn the shimmering greys and pinks of trout skin, he raced to record a summer storm with his brush, poised to dash for shelter as he hastily dabbed in boiling black clouds and brilliant rays of light, using the bristle-tracks of his brush to evoke torrents of rain lashing down on the sea.

The wildness that Constable captured in so many of his oil sketches was folded into his vision. It is there behind the calmest of his mid-summer noons. Like a barely audible rumble of thunder, it gives his exhibition pictures a depth and emotional resonance that can only come from long and passionate observation of the elements and the seasons’ changing light.

Read on: Under The Same Sky: JMW Turner

^{Turner and Constable, Tate Britain, until 12 April 2026}

^{Susan Owens is an expert on British landscape art. Her latest book, Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons, is published by Thames & Hudson in January 2026. She is former Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she was involved in the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master.}

^{Turner and Constable is in partnership with LVMH. Supported by the Huo Family Foundation and James Bartos. With additional support from the Turner and Constable Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Americas Foundation and Tate Members. The media partner is The Times and The Sunday Times. Research supported by the Manton Historic British Art Scholarship Fund.}