“Study of Sky and Trees, with a red House, at Hampstead,” by John Constable, September 12, 1821, oil on paper, 9.5 x 11.75. Collection the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

The exhibition traces the evolution of Constable’s brilliant, fluid landscape painting style, rooted in the artist’s meticulous observation of the British countryside he knew intimately from childhood. To faithfully capture shifting effects of color and light, Constable became a master of the quick oil sketch, painting rapidly outdoors on sheets of paper or scraps of canvas pinned to the lid of his paint box.

“Study of Sky and Trees,” by John Constable, ca. 1821, oil on paper, 10 x 11.75. Collection the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

Constable then used his sketches as source material for fully realized exhibition landscapes, painted in his London studio. Well aware of the new theories on the natural sciences emerging during the English Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, Constable declared, “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” To this end, he generally inscribed his oil sketches with the exact date, location and weather conditions in which they were made. But to think of these studies as merely provisional works of art is to misunderstand both their complexity and their revolutionary character as improvised works, brimming with color, open brushwork, and a sense of spontaneity that allows them to be seen as “modern” even in the 21st century. Indeed, in 1821, 53 years before the first French Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Constable wrote “But I should paint my own places best—painting is but another word for feeling.”

The exhibition begins in 1800 with Constable’s first paintings of the lush farmlands of his boyhood home—the now-canonical “Constable Country” of Suffolk and Essex— and progresses through the artist’s career, presenting works grouped according to the locations he would come to immortalize—the Stour River valley, Hampstead Heath, the Salisbury plains, and Brighton beach—all seen through the lens of his close observations from nature. At the heart of the exhibition are two vibrant full-scale studies for two of Constable’s most celebrated exhibition paintings: The Hay Wain (1821) and The Leaping Horse (1825). These important oil sketches—each nearly six feet wide—have recently been cleaned to reveal fascinating subtleties of color and brushwork for the first time in living memory.

“The Watermill at Gillingham, Dorset, by John Constable, 1823-1827, oil on canvas. Collection the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

“John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum” is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by V&A Publishing, available in the Princeton University Art Museum Store. For more information, visit the Princeton Art Museum’s website: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu.