The Constable Connection: Painting the Heath

In 1819, John Constable rented rooms at Lower Terrace in Hampstead, bringing his family for the summer to escape the heat and disease of the city below. He was 43 years old, recently elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and dissatisfied with the conventions of English landscape painting in ways he had not yet found the means to resolve.

The Cloud Studies

What followed was one of the most sustained and systematic programmes of outdoor painting in the history of Western art. Over 18 years of visits to Hampstead — initially for the summer, later year-round, after his wife Maria became too ill to travel — Constable produced over 100 oil sketches of the Heath, many of them focused specifically on the sky. He was pursuing something specific: the weather. He wanted to paint air, light, and movement — the things that conventional landscape painting had always treated as background and he now insisted were the subject.

The Method

The cloud studies are small, rapid, intensely observed. Constable worked directly from nature, often in poor weather, and the resulting works have a freshness and immediacy quite unlike anything else in English art of the period. The backs of many of the studies are inscribed with the date, time, and weather conditions — "5th of September 1822. 10 o'clock, morning, looking south-east, brisk wind." The precision is scientific as well as artistic.

The Legacy

The Hampstead paintings were not universally appreciated in Constable's lifetime. Critics found the sky studies unfinished; collectors wanted the picturesque landscapes he also produced. But when his work was exhibited in Paris in 1824, it caused a sensation. Delacroix revised his technique in response. The Barbizon School in France took Constable's attention to observed nature as a founding principle. The influence on Impressionism was direct and acknowledged. All of this from the top of a hill in North London.