Constable’s Untameable Nature

John Constable's landscape paintings, often considered scenes of bucolic fantasy, have recently started to present a thornier prospect. Perhaps surprisingly, of the two titans of British landscape painting brought together in the landmark Tate Britain show Turner and Constable, it is Constable’s formal innovation that appears to have excited critics most. I wonder whether this willingness to reappraise one of the safest figures in all of British art history as being something more of a radical has been spurred on by recent ecological debates in contemporary culture. Have Constable’s mulchy, rain-sodden scenes – their thick paint resembling clods of earth, silage rendered in stippled brushstrokes – benefited from the concerted effort of later artists, academics and activists to challenge the anthropocentric biases of Western art?

There are two forms of nostalgia at play when we look at a Constable painting. He was responsible for the first of these: Constable was a painter of the recent past, often recreating scenes from his own childhood spent in the Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border. The other has been imposed from the outside, by those who would use Constable for their political and commercial ends. The Hay Wain 1821 is one of the most widely reproduced artworks of all time and, as an idealised depiction of rural life, has become shorthand for a particular strain of Englishness. So much so that we might expect an Elgar concerto to begin playing when we encounter it.

However, when viewing the painter’s works in all their splendour (rather than reproduced on a tea towel or a biscuit tin, for example), this idealised view falls away, and the sheer earthiness of Constable’s paintings becomes inescapable. Up close, these works resemble less those of his contemporaries, than the more recent paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Frank Auerbach and Maggi Hambling. If painting of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was characterised by a realism that sought not only to recreate the material world but also subtly to improve upon it, then, with Constable, that tradition seemingly started to thaw. In works such as his oil sketch Somerset House c.1819, there’s the sense of a scene beginning to unravel. Clouds dance nonsensically around the distant spire of London’s St Mary le Strand church. The paint risks slipping out of the edges of the frame, just as the Thames, depicted within that frame, laps menacingly at the edges of the walkway.

Constable once wrote that some of his favourite subjects were ‘the sound of water escaping from Mill dams … Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork’. These filthy elements, sometimes thickly pasted onto the canvas or scratched away with a fingernail, even call to mind the work of some of the more transgressive artists of the 20th century, such as Dieter Roth, Paul Thek and Helen Chadwick, all of whom used organic matter in their work, and were preoccupied with themes of rot, decay and death.

My point in making these provocative comparisons is to highlight the ways in which we have been schooled to look at Constable, which might have very little to do with what is actually present in the work. Shrunk in reproduction, all of the mess and dirt of these paintings is glossed over. Instead, we’re presented with a sort of generalised idealism – something that feels delicate, pretty, even quaint – which is very close to how political nostalgia functions, but not necessarily personal nostalgia.

I should state for the record that I am not trying to write a revisionist history here. There are certainly idealistic elements to Constable’s work. A painting like Stratford Mill c.1820, for example, is almost certainly a composite – that is, a fantasy. Here, we have gentlemen anglers, rowers docking their boat, two young boys conspiring over their fishing rods, and equestrians roaming around in the woodland. All of this is taking place in the same scene, the implausibility of which would not have been lost on the audiences who gathered to see the work – the second of Constable’s ‘six-footer’ paintings of the Stour Valley – when it was first displayed at the Royal Academy.

That idealism, though, is mainly confined to the content, rather than the form. The cultural theorist Svetlana Boym wrote that nostalgia is composed of two parts: most obviously, a longing for the past, which would seem to be innocent enough, but also a rejection of the present. ‘A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure,’ she writes in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), ‘or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life.’ In other words, every act of longing for what has been and gone is also a commentary on what is currently lacking. We paste images of the past onto our present lives as part of a drive to improve upon it. Nostalgia, then, is partly a critical emotion.

Where nationalistic pride and political nostalgia might seek to hide or deny this second order of feeling, Constable’s landscapes make no secret of it. He was angry about industrial transformations that were taking place in rural England during his lifetime. Crucially, the simpler world that he is summoning was also not beloved for its containable beauty and visual harmony but almost the opposite – for its unruliness. In form, even paintings like Stratford Mill are dark, murky and committed to an almost obsessive level of detail. The world Constable mourned contained infinite variations of texture and scent. It was a world that was unpredictable and often overwhelming. This, he seems to say, is what is lost through the imposition of the modern workhouse, the private field and mechanisation, but also by the greed that compels capitalists towards endless overproduction and consumerism. It was the being driven indoors that he lamented. The monotony. The predictability.

In his book The Invention of Essex (2023), journalist and social historian Tim Burrows points out the challenge in trying to decipher Constable’s legacy. He explains that Constable was a painter of nostalgic scenes, but how, because of this, his work also became a tool that could be employed by others for nostalgic purposes. Many organisations local to the North Essex area used Constable as propaganda, taking his images out of context to deter the commercial forces that were encroaching from London. The Dedham Vale Society, founded in 1938, was one such group that ‘helped turn the area into a static curiosity’, writes Burrows. As an artist symbolic of nostalgia, Constable seems to have been both neutered – in terms of our appreciation for the formal qualities of his work – and simultaneously weaponised. ‘It’s ironic that one of the most lasting achievements of Constable, an artist celebrated for capturing the movement and changeability of nature,’ Burrows continues, ‘is that he helped to make a landscape stay still.’

Standing in front of a painting like On the River Stour c.1834–7, it seems remarkable that the image of Constable as a painter of quaint scenes has held for so long. Here is a festival of flecks and splatters, suggestive of a downpour. Everything ricochets, creating an impenetrable barrier between the viewer and the scene. Droplets bounce off every surface, like comets, like grenades. Of the rain and the mud and the endless material possibilities produced by the riverside, Constable wrote: ‘I love such things … As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such Places. They have always been my delight … I associate my “careless boyhood” to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (& I am grateful) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had even touched a pencil.’

What is apparent in the Tate Britain show is that political nostalgia is almost diametrically opposed to the very thing that excited Constable as a painter. Such a sentiment seeks to simplify, perfect and suppress the unpredictability that was always Constable’s muse. Rainstorm over the Sea c.1824–8 is a hastily executed, furious display of sheet rain as it falls on the channel, as viewed from the shore in Brighton. It’s my favourite of Constable’s works. Lean in closer and the inclusion of a small fishing boat, recreated in no more than a couple of flecks of paint, indicates to me that those humble enough to listen to, learn from and respect the Earth – inclusive of everyone who lives here – will prosper. Or at least, if they cannot prosper, then they might be memorialised forever in the kind of resistance through art that we are only now coming to appreciate in Constable’s work.

^{Turner and Constable, until 12 April}

^{Nathalie Olah is the author of Look Again: Class (2023), published by Tate Publishing, as well as two other works of cultural criticism. Her writing is published regularly in Frieze, Art Review and the Guardian.}

^{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.}