Five Things to Know… ‘The Landscape Reimagined,’ an exhibition on how John Constable reshaped landscape painting

In 1827, his beloved wife slowly dying of tuberculosis, the British artist John Constable painted a rainbow. 

In the small watercolor, a bright prism arcs across dark skies. Like many artists of his day, the celebrated landscape painter was fascinated by atmospheric phenomena. And at a moment of tragic uncertainty, he found solace in the rainbow.

“For Constable, whose work can be wonderfully direct, rainbows are deeply symbolic,” said Edward Town, associate curator for paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). “He’s a fervent Anglican, and the rainbow has great religious resonance for him and a powerful redemptive quality.”

The watercolor is one of several of artist’s “sky studies” on view in “John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined,” a new exhibition at the YCBA that explores how Constable’s innovative approach to capturing nature revolutionized European landscape painting in the 19th century. 

The exhibition, which runs through July 25, 2027, marks the 250th anniversary of Constable’s birth. It draws on the YCBA’s extensive collection of Constable’s works — the largest such assemblage in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Visitors will see examples of Constable’s remarkable cloud studies and open-air sketches along with two of his large format “six-footer” paintings, including “Hadleigh Castle,” an iconic work of English landscape painting. 

“Constable was an astonishing artist,” said Town, who curated the exhibition. “When looking at his work, it seems almost impossible that someone could handle paint so swiftly and confidently. There is something both joyful and enlivening about his work, epitomized in his wonderful sketches from nature, which are the foundation of this exhibition. 

“No other artist, before or since, was able to mirror nature in the way that Constable did.”

Here are more five things to know about the show:

Early in his career, Constable decided to paint nature from direct observation. 

Constable was formally trained at the Royal Academy in London, where he encountered the picturesque tradition of landscape painting, which held that visually pleasing compositions contained specific characteristics, such as variety, roughness, and irregularity. Constable was dissatisfied by the paintings his peers produced through this approach, according to the exhibit text. 

In 1802, he returned to his family’s home in East Bergholt, a village in Suffolk in eastern England, determined to develop his own style of landscape painting through direct observation. 

His father, a wealthy merchant and mill owner, helped him acquire a studio near the family’s estate. From there, he would travel countryside he knew from his childhood and paint landscapes in the open air — a practice that he’d continue to the end of his life. Two views he made of Suffolk during this early period on display in the exhibition were painted on thick, twill canvas from the same bolt of cloth.

“He’s made a canvases on stretchers that are small enough to carry it into the countryside, where he sets up his easel, sits in his portable chair, and begins to pursue the artistic project that will define his career and shape the course of landscape painting in Britain, France, and beyond for centuries to come,” Town said. 

The paintings don’t fully escape the conventions of the picturesque style, but in making them outdoors, Constable began moving away from the prevailing tradition. 

“He makes an important step here, and it’s the step to paint outside,” Town said.

Constable had a way with clouds. 

The first painting visitors encounter when entering the exhibition is a cloud study that Constable made on a hot summer day in 1822. The painting, one of several such studies on display, hovers over a pedestal, mounted on acrylic. Despite its small size, the depiction of luminous puffy cumulus clouds is surprisingly immersive. Looking at it evokes the experience of cloud gazing at the beach, or at a park, or in one’s backyard. 

Constable treated the studies as scientific and artistic enterprises. Be sure to have look at the back of the painting, where there is a handwritten note by Constable in which he dutifully recorded the date, time, and weather conditions when he made the picture: Aug. 1, 1822, 11 a.m. “very hot with large climbing clouds under the sun. Wind westerly.”

A tiny sketch sets the stage for Constable’s best-known work.

Constable’s monumental painting, “The Hay Wain,” caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1824 in Paris where it was widely admired, especially by other artists. Completed in 1821, the painting depicts the millpond at Flatford where Constable’s family owned a corn mill on the River Stour. In the foreground, an empty wagon, or wain, rolls through the shallow millpond. The painting, widely considered Constable’s most famous composition, is on view at the National Gallery in London. 

A small preparatory sketch for the masterpiece is displayed in the YCBA exhibition. It is believed that Constable produced the sketch in his studio drawing on a series of open-air sketches he’d made of the scene.

“What’s remarkable about this sketch is the way in which Constable was able to lay out all the compositional elements and the color tonality of the completed painting, which will be six feet wide, in a space that is less than six inches wide” Town said. “It’s all there. All the elements of his masterpiece — these wonderful, jewel-like objects — are there.”

One of Constable’s sketches is, itself, monumental. 

Constable’s 1820 painting “Stratford Mill” is a part of a series of “six-footers,” including “The Hay Wain,” that he produced capturing life and landscapes along the River Stour, which formed much of the boundary between the counties of Suffolk and Essex.

The exhibition features a full-size sketch for the completed version of “Stratford Mill” that he used to perfect the painting’s composition.

“Constable is unusual in that he makes full-size prototypes of his so-called ‘six-footer,’” Town said. 

The sketch, which was largely unknown until it emerged on the art market in the 1980s, is being exhibited for the first time. It offers insight into Constable’s process. Small changes, such as the position of a fishing rod that a young man is wielding in the foreground, are visible on the canvas. 

“Even at this late stage of development, Constable is reworking and reimagining,” Town said. “You can see as well how important his cloud studies are to his composition. For him, in his words, they are the chief organ of sentiment because they’re the source of light. They’re going to indicate, essentially, the mood and expression of the composition as a whole.”

One of Constable’s studies in conversation with the finished painting.     

On Nov. 23, 1828, Constable’s wife, Maria, succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 41. Devasted by her death, Constable was in mourning in February of 1829 when he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

His sadness is expressed in “Hadleigh Castle,” a six-footer he finished in 1829 that depicts a ruined medieval fortification overlooking the Thames Estuary. It was the first painting he exhibited after his election to the Royal Academy. 

“There is raw emotional power in this painting,” Town said. “Constable was explicit about this. He said in letters to a friend that without his wife, he felt as if he were a ruin.” 

A small studio sketch of “Hadleigh Castle” is mounted on a pedestal in front of the finished work, inviting visitors to compare the two images. For example, in the sketch, a shepherd drives his flock through the landscape. In the finished painting, the shepherd walks alone.