John constable landscapes

From onwards, his childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love.

But their engagement in was opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who considered the Constables his social inferiors and threatened Maria with disinheritance.

Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, a solicitor, was reluctant to see Maria throw away this inheritance, and Maria herself pointed out that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances John had of making a career in painting.

Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure; but they died in quick succession, and Constable inherited a fifth share in the family and Maria's marriage in October was followed by a honeymoon tour of the south coast, where the sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork.

At the same time, a greater emotional range began to register in his art.

Although he had scraped an income from painting, it was not until that Constable sold his first important canvas, The White Horse, which led to a series of "six footers", as he called his large-scale paintings.

He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy that year, and in he showed The Hay Wain (a view from Flatford Mill) at the Academy's exhibition.

Theodore Gericault saw it on a visit to London and was soon praising Constable in Paris, where a dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought four paintings, including The Hay Wain, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of , winning a gold medal.

Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal: "What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to every tone".

Delacroix repainted the background of his Massacre de Scio after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good.

In his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England, but in France he sold more than twenty in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad."

In , perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarrelled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet.

After the birth of her seventh child in January , Maria fell ill and died of tuberculosis that November at the age of forty-one.

Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding, "hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel-God only knows how my children will be brought up the face of the World is totally changed to me".

Thereafter, he always dressed in black and was, according to Leslie, "a prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts".

He cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life.

Shortly before her death, Maria's father had died, leaving her pound 20, Constable speculated disastrously with this money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication.

He was hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers. Constable collaborated closely with the talented mezzotinter David Lucas on some 40 prints after his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint.

Constable said, "Lucas showed me to the public without my faults", but the venture was not a financial success.

He was elected to the Royal Academy in February , at the age of 52, and in was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students.

He also began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences.

In a series of such lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a threefold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.

He also later spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation".

In , his last lecture to the students of the RA, in which he praised Raphael and called the R.A.

the "cradle of British art", was "cheered most heartily". He died on the night of the 31st March, apparently from indigestion, and was buried with Maria in the graveyard of St John-at-Hampstead, Hampstead. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family tomb.) (From Wikipedia)