He was the fourth child born into a wealthy family - his father, Golding Constable, was a corn

merchant and owned watermills at Flatford and Dedham and a windmill at East Bergholt. After leaving Dedham Grammar School he joined the family business.

A lot of his spare time was spent sketching the landscapes around him and, at 19, after being encouraged by a local amateur artist, he persuaded his father to send him to the Royal Academy in London to study art. JMW Turner, a year older, was a fellow student but the two were not friends. While Turner’s genius was recognised in his lifetime, Constable only sold 20 paintings while alive.

Love story

Because of his unstable income, Constable wasn’t seen as a suitable husband for his bride-to-be, Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the rector of East Bergholt. It was only after the artist’s rich father died in 1816 that they married later that year, following a clandestine seven-year courtship.

After a period living in Bloomsbury, the coupled settled in Hampstead, north London (then situated outside the city), and had seven children – five of whom went on to become artists. When Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828, aged 40, Constable was devastated and his most productive period of painting came to an end.

A year after Maria’s death, in 1829, 54-year-old Constable was reluctantly awarded full membership in the Royal Academy by a majority of one vote; his great rival, Turner, had been elected at 26.

"Weymouth Bay" by John Constable. In October 1816 he went to Osmington, near Weymouth, for his honeymoon
©National Gallery London

A new way of painting

He had, by this time, begun to win recognition abroad for his intricate oil paintings of rural scenes. The Hay Wain (1821), Constable’s most recognised painting, won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824.

At the time his style was unconventional. Many of his contemporaries were painting mythological and Biblical subjects set in over-the-top, idyllic landscapes. However, Constable was keen to capture the atmospheric effects of changing light and the movement of clouds around his Suffolk birthplace, where he often spent the summer, and Hampstead.

He once said: “No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world. The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.”

Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. Many of the scenes he painted can still be appreciated today, along with Flatford Mill and Willie Lott’s Cottage, which appears in The Hay Wain. At Bridge Cottage, next to Flatford Mill, there is a musem based on the artist and his life.

While he was not recognised during his lifetime, and never travelled abroad, he was a major influence on French Romantics such as Delacroix, the painters of the Barbizon School, who followed his lead in working outdoors, and the French Impressionists.
 
Constable died on March 31, 1837, and is buried in the churchyard of St John’s, Hampstead. He is considered, along with Turner, to be one of the greatest British landscape artists.