Head in the Clouds, Clouds in the Head:Late Constable @ the Royal Academy.

Arundel, Brighton, Hampstead Heath, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Waterloo Bridge. John Constable may have lived nearly two hundred years before me but he visited a lot of places that have become part of my life. Either where I live (London), where I visit often (Brighton), or where the TADS and LbF walks may take me (Salisbury, Arundel).

Even the places he painted that I haven't visited (especially the Suffolk locations like East Bergholt and Dedham Vale) have been on my radar as potential locations for future walks. If those walks are to happen, however, I'd probably be hoping for a few less clouds than John Constable was wont to paint. Constable loved to paint a pretty, idyllic, rural scene but I didn't count one single painting at the RA's current Late Constable exhibition in which, if the sky was present - as it usually is in his work, clouds didn't dominate.

A Boat Passing a Lock (1826)

A reflection on Constable's mental state, a reflection on the (sometimes) terrible British weather, or was John Constable just really unlucky and every time he packed his easel and brushes and headed out to paint the sun would dip behind a thick screen of little fluffy clouds.

Perhaps that's why he's so fond of adding rainbows. In Constable's work rainbows are more prominent than sunshine. You can see why. Rainbows are great. They never get boring. They're also a good way of showing off how good a painter you are and Constable's a great painter. Even if you find his work a bit chocolate boxy you'd have to admit it is technically superb.

With Late Constable, it seems to me that the RA are trying to show that Constable was more experimental, more groundbreaking, than we tend to give him credit for. I think what they're trying to do is put him up there with Turner as a maverick and a modern artist whose work paved the way for Impressionism and other revolutionary French styles of painting.

It's easy to see where they're coming from. Even A Boat Passing a Lock (the painting he chose to present to the RA when he was made an Academician in 1829, three years after painting it and already in his early fifties) which looks, initially, to belong on the side of your nan's biscuit tin is actually pioneering. For me, it's in that top left hand corner where a dark cloud hovers. There's something almost abstract about it. It could quite easily have influenced the work of Frank Auerbach.

Flatford Lock, A Path by a River (c.1810-12)

Even the woozy trees and almost three dimensional clouds of Flatford Lock, A Path by a River (from nearly two decades earlier) seem at odds with the more formal, starchy, landscape paintings of the era. I don't know if Constable was a fully signed up plein air painter but it certainly feels that way. These paintings don't seem still. They contain movement. Looking at them you can feel the wind, sometimes even the cold. You feel exposed to the elements. Most of them anyway.

Sadly not the sun. Constable had been born, in 1776, and bred along the banks of the Stour in Suffolk so it's no wonder the area features so regularly in his work. When he married Maria Bicknell in 1816, they moved to London and he opened a studio on Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia. Maria's poor health meant that she and Constable spent the summers away from London.

In Hampstead! Then in Brighton when her health got even worse. So you can see why London and Brighton crop up in his work. When Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828 (leaving Constable as sole parent to SEVEN young children), one year before he was accepted as a member of the Royal Academy, Constable had established a reputation as an accomplished landscape painter but had still sold very few paintings.

Cloud Study (1821)

I don't think that's why he painted so many clouds though. I don't think they were some kind of expression, direct or otherwise, of his mental state. At least, not at first. I think, quite simply, he was interested in nature and how it really was and he saw it in the shifting shapes of these aerosol masses of liquid droplets. At this exhibition you can read how he used to read widely on then current meteorological research. He was even planning to give a lecture on skies and clouds before he died.

Distant View of the Grove, Hampstead (1822)

The Leaping Horse (1825)

The Cornfield (1826)

Of course, indulging his passion for realistic depictions of nature had to be balanced against providing for his family so when his 'canal' paintings of the Stour, such as The Leaping Horse, didn't sell he moved his attention to country lanes and panoramic vistas. The Cornfield shows Fen Lane between East Bergholt and Constable's former school in Dedham and I can't help but imagine the shepherd boy quenching his thirst in a puddle and the sheepdog were added to attract potential buyers who may have felt the scene too bare without them.

At the same time, Constable branched out into coastal painting. Brighton's chain pier had only been built three years before Constable painted it which demonstrates that, like Turner, Constable was interested in depicting the modern, and newly industrial, world as well as nature. Though, of course, fishermen still feature. The Chain Pier, Brighton's first pier, would last until it was destroyed during a storm in 1896 but the wreckage of it was clearly visible from Brighton's front until only about a decade ago. Those who lived in, or visited, Brighton will remember clearly.

Chain Pier, Brighton (1826-27)

Dedham Vale (1828)

Hadleigh Castle (1829)

While Constable regularly returned to Dedham Vale, East Bergholt, and Suffolk to paint he also ventured down to Essex where he captured the majestic ruins (what, today, we might call ruin porn) of Hadleigh Castle on the Thames Estuary between Benfleet and Southend. A spot where, rather happily, I'll be dragging the TADS out to in June this year.

Painted while still suffering the pain of his wife's death, and with anxious thoughts about his future, it captures the tumultuous emotions that must have been building in his head at the time and in the instance of Hadleigh Castle we can, I think quite safely, say that though Constable is showing his interest in meteorology, the clouds here do reflect his mental state at the time.

The same could be said of Rainstorm over the Sea. While Hadleigh Castle won Constable plaudits at the time it is the slightly earlier work, Brighton again being the subject, that looks, to our modern eyes, the most forward thinking. The torrential rain has been created by impatient impressionistic downward sweeps of Constable's brush and the surface of the sea ripples violently at a lower than expected horizon on the canvas.

Rainstorm over the Sea (c.1824-28)

Sketch of Michelangelo's 'Taddei Tondo' (1830)

Trees and a Stretch of Water on the Stour (c.1836)

It's probably the closest Constable gets to late Turner. It's a side of Constable we're not often shown and that also goes for the watercolours, mezzotints, and hastily drawn sketches of Michelangelo masterpieces that fill out one of the smaller rooms of the RA's show.

Here we can see Constable expand his vision beyond landscape and into history and mythology. Jacques, with his wounded stag, is a melancholic philosopher from Shakespeare's As You Like It and Stonehenge, as everybody knows, is as storied a historical site as all England possesses. The British Museum, later this month, are hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to Stonehenge so that is something I look forward to, hopefully, attending and writing about.

Jacques and the Wounded Stag (c.1834-36)

Stonehenge (1835)

Constable painted Stonehenge with a double rainbow behind it and it looks almost as if a poster for a free festival for new age travellers. It's something of an outlier in his work but I still liked it. I like the fact that he's put people in it so that we can see Stonehenge as a site of wonder and interaction for visitors rather than the foreboding image of it we're often forced to accept.

Stonehenge has featured on a TADS walk but, alas, it was one from before the blogging era (in fact, the first TADS walk - the one in which the name TADS was coined) so I can't do a hyperlink to it. Netley Abbey, however, was one of the attractions of September 2019's walk from Bursledon to Southampton. Except it was closed when we got there so we looked at it through a fence while Adam stroked a guard dog.

Constable, it seems, had better luck. Returning to the medieval monastery so that he could depict it both in daylight and in moonlight, he captures something of the former austerity of the building while still instilling it with a sense of awe and wonder. The ruins, from 1826, were painted on his honeymoon (the old romantic) but the moonlit watercolour was made after his wife's death and it's got a spectral feel that may have reflected how he felt revisiting a site alone, a widower, that he had previously seen during the height of love.

The Ruins of Netley Abbey (1826)

Netley Abbey by Moonlight (c.1833)

There's a song I'm rather fond of called Postcards of Scarborough by the recently deceased Michael Chapman that, despite being set at the other end of the country, talks movingly about how sights and sites change dependent on our situation. A view that may have been pure joy when shared can be one tinged with grief when taken in alone.

To the point it can become overwhelmingly sad. When we walked from Salisbury to Stonehenge back in 2015 we passed over and through Old Sarum. Of course, it turns out, Constable had beaten us to it and included it in his English Landscape series. It almost looks too dramatic to belong in Wiltshire, in southern England. Again, it's the clouds that tie it to our green and (sometimes) pleasant land. My memories are of something more verdant but, again, perhaps the stark quality of Constable's painting is down to his personal circumstances.

Old Sarum (1834)

Hampstead, Looking towards London (1833)

Arundel Mill and Castle (1835)

Or even the fact that he was nearing the end of his life. Constable would die, aged 60, in London and is buried in Hampstead. Which seems apt as it was a place he was clearly so fond of. As am I. He paints it and I make people go for walks round it. As I have done with Arundel. Arundel Castle, which dominates the skyline of the small West Sussex town, is merely a background presence in Constable's graphite drawing of Arundel Mill.

You can just see it poking its head out from behind the trees at the middle rear of the composition. Constable's final decade was not spent entirely in grief and in making painting that reflected his grief in landscapes, ruined abbeys, and obscured castles. He threw himself into his duties as a Royal Academician with "great diligence and application". He delivered lectures, he taught life drawing, and he strove to elevate landscape painting to the level of history painting.

A Cottage with a Rainbow (1829)

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (c.1829)

Which had, until then - and I feel it's quite the reverse now - perhaps thanks to Constable, been held to be a superior form. His range of subjects remained similar. Alongside quaint looking cottages and his trademark rainbows he took in impressive old buildings like the imposing Salisbury Cathedral and feats of modern engineering like London's new Waterloo Bridge.

Waterloo Bridge had only opened a decade earlier and Constable's painting shows the then Prince Regent, later George IV, about to embark the royal barge at Whitehall stairs while a cannon is fired in the distance. It's a surprisingly busy painting for Constable whose heart, you get the impression, seemed more at ease in quieter, more rural, settings.

The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (c.1829-31)

The Glebe Farm (c.1830)

The Valley Farm (1835)

A Farmhouse near the Water's Edge ('On the Stour') (c.1830-36)

Farms and farmhouses, ideally in Suffolk, primarily it seems. The Glebe Farm features a church that Constable considered converting into a windmill but then decided against it, The Valley Farm depicts Willy Lott's House which also features in Constable's most famous painting The Hay Wain (alas not included in this show - but a short walk to the National Gallery and you can see it for free), and A Farmhouse near the Water's Edge is an alarmingly violent piece of work for the older man.

It's scratchy and it's hard to tell if it's actually unfinished or if Constable intended it to look this way. Either to capture some inner turmoil or some particularly atrocious weather conditions. Or perhaps he'd just bought a new palette knife and was determined to make the most of it before he popped his clogs.

A Cottage at East Bergholt (c.1833)

Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow (1836)

The show ends, as Constable's life did, with the last painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy and the last painting he ever made. Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (the former) shows a monument to the older painter in the grounds of his home at Coleorton Hall in Leicestershire flanked by busts of Michelangelo and Raphael. Which seems like high praise indeed and praise, in my mind, that Constable earned more than Reynolds did.

The stag turns his head away from Reynolds' cenotaph and instead looks out at the painter, Constable, and the viewers, us. The stag knows where it's at. In 1837, while visiting Arundel with his eldest son, Constable died suddenly. He was working on, and had pretty much completed, another (very familiar by now) view of Arundel Mill and Castle.

Like much of Constable's work, it's prettiness can place a cloud over our ability to see his inventiveness and though we take these paintings these days to be rather small c conservative they were, at the time, anything but. The shock of the old may not work for us anymore but Constable's work is still great. He saw a Britain covered in clouds but knew, and constantly showed us, that those clouds were just as important a part of the overall picture as the glorious rainbows, tall trees, and riparian life that he foregrounded throughout his own eventful life and career. A good afternoon out for me.

Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1833-36)

Arundel Mill and Castle (1837)