Constable: the Making of a Master
The early rooms
looked is early access to Old Master works via Sir George Beaumont and there
was a nice section where his work was hung next to the work which had
influenced it. Later on there was a section on Constable’s habit of copying Old
Masters and again his work and the original were hung together.
There was also a
lot on how Constable liked to work from nature and was interested in getting
the detail right so there were lovely drawings and watercolour sketches
including a beautiful picture of poppies and cloud studies.
I liked the
section on technique and was fascinated to see he sometimes painted a scene
outdoors on glass which he held up to a scene so he had the proportions exactly
right when he got to the studio. Another room looked at the evolution of a
picture and had drawings for sections of some of the iconic works such as “The
Hay Wain”, full sized oil sketches for the finished work and the work itself.
Often I preferred the oil sketch to the finished piece as to a modern eye there
were more spontaneous.
A final section
of the show looked at how Constable has influenced artists since and examples
of where more modern artists have used his work in the way he did the Old
Masters. A good example was Freud who made a print of one of Constable’s tree
pictures for a Constable show in Paris in 2003.
Constable is
definitely an artists whose work is worth seeing in the flesh, we are so used
to see reproductions of them it is always different to see the real thing and
the brush work on them. To see him as a craftsman not just a composer of
images.
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