John Constable: Drawings

John Constable was English artist, positioned with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape painters. His most excellent paintings are of the places Constable knew, mainly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived. He worked broadly in the open air, drawing and sketching, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio.

Often completing primary sketches previous to beginning a canvas, Constable would draw and try to capture a moment in occasion, testing the composition first in sketches in a grid formation so that they could be accurately scaled up when the artist started to work on larger paintings later.

In England Constable had no real successor and the many imitators (including his son Lionel) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, on the other hand, he was a major influence on Romantic artists such as Delacroix, on the painters of the Barbizon School, and on the Impressionists.