Constable, JOHN, R.A., landscape-painter, was born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, where his father was a well-to-do landowner and miller, 11th June 1776. At the age of eighteen he assisted his father for about a year in the mill; but his love of art was irrepressible, and it was encouraged by Sir George Beaumont, who prevailed upon his family to send him to London. Here he arrived in 1795; and, after an interval of a year spent in his old employment, he returned in 1799, and entered the schools of the Royal Academy, to whose exhibition he sent a work in 1802. Hitherto he had been carefully studying the methods of other painters, poring over Sir George's great Claude, and copying Ruysdael, seeking, as he says, 'truth at second-hand.' He now turned exclusively to nature, resolving to free himself from conventionality, to paint the very fact, to 'adopt a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.' But the public, trained to admire an artificial and pseudo-classical adaptation of nature, cared little for his simple renderings of common subjects, and he was nearly forty before he sold a single landscape beyond the circle of his relatives and personal friends. Meanwhile he supported himself by painting likenesses; he copied portraits by Reynolds for the Earl of Dysart, and executed altar-pieces for the churches of Brantham and Nayland in Suffolk.
In 1816 he married Mary Bicknell; and in 1828, on the death of her father, solicitor to the Admiralty, an inheritance of £20,000 placed the family in easy circumstances, and enabled Constable to devote himself quite exclusively to his beloved but unremunerative landscape work. In 1821 he had won the best artistic triumph of his life, in the applause which greeted the appearance of his 'Haywain' (then titled 'A Landscape—Noon'), when it was exhibited in the Paris Salon by a French purchaser. Not less marked was the impression produced by his 'White Horse,' at the Lille Exhibition in 1825. Each work gained a gold medal, and the former in particular won the warmest enthusiasm of Delacroix and the other leaders of the romantic school, and exercised a definite and powerful influence upon the future of landscape art in France. Appreciation of this sort was more precious to a true artist than such formal academic honours as Constable won in England, than his election as Associate in 1819, and his tardy and ungraciously awarded promotion to membership in 1829. His later years were saddened by the deaths of his wife and his friend Archdeacon Fisher, by ill-health, and by great depression of spirits; but he worked steadily at his art, though his landscapes still were frequently unsold, producing 'Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows' (1831); 'Waterloo Bridge,' then titled 'Whitehall Stairs' (1832); and 'The Valley Farm' (1835). He was engaged upon 'Arundel Mill and Castle' at the time of his death, which occurred suddenly, on the 30th of March 1837.
The art of Constable marks the first definite departure in the history of English landscape from the conventional treatment of our earlier painters, the breaking away from the traditions of Claude and the Dutch masters, the return to direct and personal impressions of nature. With a broad and rapid touch he renders all the force and variety of colouring that full-leafed English landscape presents; catches, with singular skill, her passing effects of rain-cloud and sunlight; suggests, with swift and unsurpassable power, her sense of glitter and motion. Mr Ruskin's criticism has, alike in its general scope and in most of its specific references, done much to disparage Constable's art in the estimation of the public of the time that is just passing; but already there is a recoil on the part of both painters and critics from the detailed intricacy of pre-Raphaelite methods; Constable's works are assuming their true place in the sequence of our national art; and their painter is being recognised as one of the very foremost figures of English landscape-painters. Three of his most important and most powerful landscapes, 'The Valley Farm,' 'The Cornfield,' and 'The Hay-wain,' were already in the National Gallery in 1888, when five more were gifted by the painter's family. His 'Salisbury Cathedral' is at South Kensington, where, as also in the British Museum, his work in water-colour and pencil may be studied.
The most important of the engravings after Constable are the mezzotint plates by David Lucas, many of which were supervised with especial care during their progress by the painter himself. See his Life by C. R. Leslie (1843; new ed. 1896).