Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [60]
As a boy, Constable had learned to “read” the sky while setting the sails on his father’s wind-mills, and as a man he applied this interest in meteorology to his painting. He often went “skying” — sketching cloud formations as source material for paintings. The sky, he believed, was “the key note, .
.. and the chief organ of sentiment” in a painting. This love of clouds and sun and shadow led him to make the first oil sketches ever painted outdoors, starting in 1802, thus anticipating the Impressionists’ open-air methods (though Constable executed the final finished paintings — “six-footers,” he called them — in his studio).
Constable believed landscapes should be based on observation. His rural scenes reflect an intense love of nature, but he insisted they were not idealized: “imagination never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by comparison with realities,” he wrote.
Because of his devotion to actual appearances, Constable rebelled against the coffee-colored tones then in vogue for landscapes, correctly insisting they were actually the result of darkened varnish on Old Master paintings. When a friend claimed Poussin’s original tints were the brownish color of a violin, Constable responded by putting a violin on the grass to demonstrate the difference.
Constable simulated the shimmer of light on surfaces by tiny dabs of color stippled with white. (Many found these white highlights incomprehensible, calling them “Constable’s snow.”) He put tiny red dots on leaves to energize the green, hoping the vibrations between complementary hues would convey an impression of movement like the flux of nature.
Constable, “The Hay Wain,” 1821, NG, London. Constable portrays the farmer with his hay wagon (or “wain”) as an integral part of the landscape, emphasizing Constable’s mystical feeling of man being at one with nature. Critics found this landscape so lifelike one exclaimed, “The very dew is on the ground! ”
TURNER: A TURN TOWARDS ABSTRACTION. Like Constable, J.M.W Turner ( 1775-1851 ) began painting bucolic landscapes with a smooth, detailed technique. Also like Constable, he later experimented with more radical techniques and evolved a highly original style that influenced later generations of artists. The two painters differed, however, in Turner’s love of the dramatic, of subjects like fires and storms. Turner painted nature in the raw.
The child of a poor London barber, Turner skipped school to sketch his father’s customers. By the age of 12 he was selling his watercolors and at 15 had exhibited at the Royal Academy. His calm, familiar, rural scenes were an immediate hit with the public and made him a financial success. Once Turner began to travel to the continent, he became fascinated by the wilder aspects of nature and evolved his distinct style. He aimed to evoke awe in his viewers and shifted his subject from calm countrysides to Alpine peaks, flaming sunsets, and the theme of man’s struggle against the elements.
Turner, “Crossing the Brook,” 1815, Tate Gallery, London. Although Turner become the most original landscape artist, his early work was a tame imitation of traditional techniques and content.
Turner’s style gradually became more abstract as he attempted to make color alone inspire feeling. The foremost colorist of his day, Turner was the first to abandon brown or buff priming for a white undercoat, which made the final painting more brilliant. He neutralized deep tones by adding white and left light tones like yellow undiluted for greater luminosity. People said he put the sun itself into his paintings.
“Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway” is a typical late painting in which Turner eliminated detail to concentrate on the essential form of a locomotive speeding over a bridge toward the viewer. This was one of the . first paintings of a steam