constable and turner

Mihai Eminescu once said that art means eternal serenity due to the fact that human passions will always remain the same… The word that best describes art is harmony as this represents the analogy of contraries. Art, through all its forms, a bridge built between reality, the outside world and the inside, the feelings of the author, can ennoble a character.

By looking into this gold mirror which is art, one gets an insight into the innermost mysteries of life, works of art being a glimpse of reality, of life, in general. Why art? Because harmony is art itself and it should dominate our existence in order to get away from the intricate labyrinth that sometimes overwhelms us. Everywhere we look, everything we see is art, we are constantly surrounded by it without even realizing. Nature, with its colours and shapes, the waving of the hills, forests and plains, the charm of flowers, the power of the sun, the fire or the storm, a building or a classical landscape, is art, perfect art in fact, a world of inspiration for artists of all kinds.

I can imagine art as a pure sun and all the derived fields as rays that emerge from it, trying to enrich our spiritual horizon. Music caresses our hearing with its tones and harmonies, it upsets, it moves to tears, it delights our senses. Poetry, literature, generally speaking, is the art of writing having the immense power to make us walk through an unknown world, the world of fiction, full of fantasies, of happiness and sadness, of love and hate. Undoubtedly, one might wonder why painting… Because the image, the “culture of the eye” is the one that remains, the one that is buried deep down in our mind, as a vivid icon. Yet, this is not the only reason. The whole world represents a subject for the painting brush. Consequently, painting has its roots in the nature, it gathers its sap from the natural environment, it starts and it finishes there. The painter discovers everywhere a beautiful combination of tones, an interesting mixture of colours and shapes, a spot of light with cheerful shadows. And all this impression and original perception is set on the canvas. The sensitivity of the artist reveals a specific feeling to the viewer. While a grey, dull scenery fills us with sadness and a sense of pressure, a colourful picture symbolizing life, the life of Mother Nature, “advises” to adopt an optimistic state of mind. In paintings representing landscapes, one can feel the throb of life; there are relations of luminosity, of colour between the background and the objects.

All in all, painting is art, music, colour, the last being the one that has the power to express an emotional belief, feelings, ideas, concepts on life. And I wonder… what could be more wonderful than light, colour, harmony, nature?

If I were a writer, a poet or a painter, I would definitely choose as main topics of my creations Romantic motifs because they came to concern themselves with the theme of nature and especially with those aspects of nature which transcended or escaped the ordered patternings of mathematical form. Romantics became interested in certain aspects of human behaviour which eluded control by the rational powers.

            For me, Romanticism does not mean an artistic movement, but a certain state of mind, of feeling and a certain mode of expressing emotions. I can strongly affirm that Romantic masterpieces fascinated me from the very moment I came across them. But one field captured my full attention, as it impresses through various ways: colour, shape, disposement in space, brightness, succeeding in attracting not only the eye, but also the soul. I was absolutely impressed by several pictures of two great figures representing the English Romantic painting: Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable. The only question that came into my mind was: “Can this be the work of a human mind?” due to the fact that I was convinced that only a good hand could not be able to create such masterpieces. And I was right: the two proved that a brilliant mind can overcome the so-called lack of talent by turning the hand from a simple part of the body into its servant.

Consequently, I have decided to get acquainted to this subject and the result of my research work is expected not to be a scientific brochure, but only a guide into the marvellous world of these creations and an attempt to explain the message transmitted to their contemporaries and to future generations. 

                                    INTRODUCTION

By the 18^th century a distinctive British painting style began to emerge and tended to be brighter and livelier than the darker European canvases. British painters of this period stood within the confines of neo-classical rationalism, that is, their works of art exhibited the values of order, logic and proportion. By the end of this century and the beginning of the 19^th century, English painting turned towards nature, aiming to arouse the understanding of the beauty, its wilderness and purity.

The 18^th century poets were stimulated by nature to reflect on the meaning of life: within the heart of nature, the poet encounters his own self and yields in front of his feelings and lyricism. In Wordsworth’s poems, for example, the exact description of a fascinating corner of nature perfectly harmonizes with deep poetical feelings and with an almost religious worship for it. But an exquisite poem of this kind is not the only form of art capable to touch the depths of our souls. Painting, through its many components that impress the eye, as well as the heart, succeeds in transmitting the sensations, states of mind and messages of painters.

Few observers on either side of the Channel disputed the originality of the British landscape school. The aims of British landscape painters diverged markedly from the contemporary French practice. French artists sketched in the open-air (plein-air), like their British contemporaries, to encourage spontaneity and careful observation of natural light and colour. But these qualities often vanished in the final painting. Finished works were invariably arranged artificially, to accommodate an elevated subject from mythology, literature or nature. These were often set in Italy because of its associations with an idealized classical past. French critics and artists were struck by the ability of British painters to present finished works which retained the freshness of the original sketch. In 1824, the statesman and journalist, Adolphe Thiers, claimed that: “…the British don’t dream of a better world, they copy what they see and paint the truth.”

The English landscape painting reached its culmination in the early 19^th century after its firmly establishment by the end of the 18^th century. The great flowering came during the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily in the works of two masters, John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner.

The “Titans” of English painting developed similar themes, using nature as main subject of their creation. “The beauty and delicacy of her separate forms and colours”, seen through the eyes of the artists gave birth to magnificent creations. With their fresh vision and powerfully original styles, these painters are two important personalities who profoundly influenced the work not only of many subsequent English painters, but of countless American and English artists as well. Through their innovative themes and techniques, they revolutionized painting, offering it a new meaning. With their remarkable gifts and their intense feelings, Turner and Constable extended the whole realm of landscape painting and thus made an immensely important contribution to the art of the 19^th century.

Romanticism represents an European and American movement extending from about 1800 to 1850. Romanticism cannot be identified as a single style, technique, or attitude, but Romantic painting is generally characterized by a highly imaginative and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dream-like or visionary quality. Whereas Classical and Neo-Classical art is calm and restrained in feeling, and clear and complete in expression, Romantic art characteristically strives to express by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. Thus, the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann declared "infinite longing" to be the essence of Romanticism. In their choice of subject matter, artists of the Romantic Movement showed an affinity with nature, especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and for exotic, melancholy and melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion.  

 

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER        

“Turner has magnificent, glamorous, admirable visions. They are simple visions, yet pure art and we could live and die among such paintings.”

John Constable

Joseph Mallord William Turner, perhaps the best-loved English Romantic artist, became known as the “painter of light” due to the increasing interest in brilliant colours as the main constituent in his land and sea-scapes. His works include water colours, oils and engravings.

Turner was born at 21, Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden, London in 1775. The date of his birth is still disputed, but generally believed to be St. George's Day - 23rd April. He was the only son of William Turner and Mary Marshall (who died when Turner was only five years old). His sister died the following year. Unfortunately, he received little schooling. His father, a barber and a wigmaker,   realized his son's artistic talents early, asserting that "my son is going to be a painter”. Consequently, he taught young Turner how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. He always encouraged and supported his son's artistic abilities, and eventually gave up the barber trade and sold his shop to become business manager of his son's affairs. By the age of 12 he was already drawing and painting in watercolour, most of his works being made of memory and displayed in his father’s shop window for sale. Turner was amongst the first impressionist painters who in turn were the forerunners to the French impressionists. During his lifetime he produced over 20.000 paintings and drawings.

Turner, the most original of English landscape artists (in watercolor he is unsurpassed) was entirely devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career, his genius showed early -at only 15 years old received a rare honour-one of his works was exhibited at the Royal Academy and continued to show his work there until 1850. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio and shortly thereafter, his drawings were commercially reproduced by printers. His great passion in life since childhood, was to be an artist - a path he never deviated from, even forsaking marriage and family. He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy because of his drawings of Norham Castle. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member of the 42 strong Royal Academians. He made frequent summer sketching tours of Britain and in 1802 he began traveling widely throughout Europe. He became especially fond of old buildings, castles, churches and ruins. He sketched these in a small sketch book during his walking tours in the countryside. He continued this practice throughout his life. In 1807 he became professor of perspective at the Royal Academy and in 1845 was appointed deputy professor. 

His work was exhibited yearly at the Academy until the year before his death. Turner specialized in portraying in watercolour and pencil, the turbulence of nature in landscapes and also the storms at sea. He also drew inspiration from the new forces of the Industrial Revolution in the context of industrial art for which he is also renowned.

Turner was a most conscientious member of the Academy Council and he held a number of important positions within that organization, becoming professor of perspective in 1807. He lectured on landscape painting at the Academy from 1811 to 1828. The Royal Academy was established to maintain a national school or academy of design for the education of painters, sculptors and architects. Turner was a most conscientious member of the Academy Council and he held a number of important positions within that organization, becoming professor of perspective in 1807. He lectured on landscape painting at the Academy from 1811 to 1828. The Royal Academy was established to maintain a national school or academy of design for the education of painters, sculptors and architects.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English landscape painter who is renowned especially for his dynamic treatment of natural light effects in land and marine subjects. His work is of direct importance in the development of impressionism. Turner's early paintings were predominantly watercolors and his subjects mostly landscapes. By the late 1790s he had started exhibiting his first oil paintings, eventually transferring to the oils the same vibrations of color that had proved so successful in his watercolors. His mature work falls into three periods.

During the first period (1800-1820) Turner painted many picturesque mythological and historical scenes in which the coloring was subdued and details and contours were emphasized. He was influenced by the 17th-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, notably in the use of atmospheric effects, as in The Sun Rising Through Vapor, and in the treatment of architectural forms, as in Dido Building Carthage.

The paintings of the artist's second period are characterized by more brilliant coloring and by diffusion of light. In two of Turner's best works, Bay of Baiae and Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, his use of light lends radiance to the colors and softens architectural and topographical forms and shadows.
           Turner's artistic genius reached its culmination during his third period. In such works as Snow Storm: Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth , Peace-Burial at Sea, and Rain, Steam, and Speed, he achieved a vibrant sense of force by presenting objects as indistinct masses within a glowing haze of color. Some of the forces represented are the strength of the sea and the rhythm of rain. Other famous works of this period include The Fighting Téméraire, The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, and The Approach to Venice. The development of this final and most spectacular style displeased the academicians and all the critics except Ruskin. Turner completely abandoned his romantic and classical landscapes and devoted himself to a series of works in which atmospheric conditions become the principal subject matter. He created visionary, swirling, misty scenes that are a symbolic expression of the forces of nature and a giant step toward the French Impressionists' direct recording of nature in all conditions of wind and weather. Constable called Turner's final works "airy visions, painted with tinted steam," an opinion that is accurate if understated, for the "airy visions" are eminently exciting, and the "tinted steam" is both poetic, and imaginative.

Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings. A trip to Italy at the age of forty-four drastically altered his style, leading to his late emphasis on the power of color and light to create dramatic, evocative scenes. 

As he grew older, Turner became an eccentric. Despite his early and continued success, he lived the life of a recluse. As his fame grew, he maintained a large gallery in London for exhibition of his work, but continued to live quietly with his elderly father. Except for the latter, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days. His father died in 1829, which had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression.
           In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, after a search of many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the following day - December 19, 1851 (aged 76).

Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not come to pass owing to a dispute by his descendants over the legality of his will. Twenty years after his death, the paintings were given over to the British Museum. A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour.

         

JOHN CONSTABLE

             “My light is one of those that cannot go down because it belongs to the Nature.”

John Constable

John Constable (1776-1837) is another favourite English Romantic painter,    ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists.

Constable was born on June 11, 1776, (one year after Turner) in East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a prosperous corn merchant with two water mills and 90 acres of land. After leaving Dedham Grammar School (now a private house), he worked in the family business, although his real desire was to be an artist. Here had acquired some sort of grounding however: his spare time had been passed with the local plumber and artist, John Dunthorne. In 1795 he met Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter who showed him a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain - Hagar and the Angel, enticing Constable to study art. He also had made friends with two artists-cum-antiquarians, John Cranch and J.T. Smith, assisting the latter with his etchings of picturesque cottages and with his research on Gainsborough. Once in London, Constable studied Old Master landscapes in the collections of Beaumont, Beckford and the influential Academician Joseph Farington. Constable continued to study and copy the work of his predecessors for as long as he lived, constantly measuring their interpretations of the natural world against his own experience of it.  He exhibited his first landscape painting in 1802 and also received an invitation to become a drawing master at a military establishment. This he rejected, having now set himself a more ambitious goal. Constable returned one day from Beaumont's collection “with a deep conviction”, he told Dunthorne, “of the truth of Sir Joshua Reynolds's observation” that “there is no easy way of becoming a good painter”. It can only be obtained by long contemplation and incessant labour in the executive part ... I shall shortly, return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature - and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected representation of the scenes that may employ me'. He continued to make outdoor oil studies until the 1820s. Tentative at first, and carrying overtones of Claude and Gainsborough, his sketching had become by about 1810 a fluent and distinctly personal means of getting at his material, as can be seen from such examples in the Gallery as A Lane near Flatford and Dedham from near Gun Hill, Langham.

Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. He was told by its President that he was 'peculiarly fortunate' to be chosen when there were History Painters on the list. In an attempt to counter the neglect and misunderstanding of his art he collaborated with David Lucas on a series of mezzotints after his works, accompanied by explanatory texts. Meeting failure even here, Constable wrote to Leslie: “every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms?”. During this time, in his exhibition pieces Constable tried to synthesize the particular knowledge gained through his outdoor sketches and to realize those larger images of his native countryside which had preoccupied him, he said, even before he became a painter. Unfortunately, few others understood or appreciated what he was up to. His first major Suffolk landscape, Dedham Vale: Morning, was shown at the Academy in 1811 but passed unnoticed. His first sale to a stranger came only in 1814, when the bookseller James Carpenter gave him twenty guineas and some books for his previous year's production. 

In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the fact of strong opposition from her family.

Faced with more sympathetic sitters, Constable revealed considerable potential in this field, as his portrait of Maria Bicknell shows. This was painted in 1816, a few months before they married. With a new confidence (and soon to be relieved of some of his financial worries), Constable set his sights even higher. Although Flatford Mill, exhibited in 1817, remained on his hands, he began the first of his six-foot canvases of river subjects, The White Horse, showing it at the Academy in 1819. This time his work was, his biographer C. R. Leslie remarked, “too large to remain unnoticed”. In the construction of these large compositions Constable found the need of some intermediate stage between his small oil studies and the final canvases.

During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824  and Constable was admired by the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, by Bonington, by the Barbizon painters who, following Constable’s example, began to paint outdoors, and by the Impressionists, who sought to capture the effects of light. At Hampstead Constable became more acutely conscious of weather as a continuous phenomenon, for ever altering the appearance of the landscape: he became, indeed, more aware of the changefulness of nature as a whole. In 1821 and 1822 he undertook an intense study of the most transient of all natural phenomena, the sky, producing dozens of cloud sketches, annotating them with precise details of time, wind direction and so on. In his larger paintings of the late 1820s and 1830s placid summer scenes gave way to more unsettled conditions: a choppy sea and figures scurrying before the wind in - the first glints of sunrise after a stormy night in Hadleigh Castle; and in Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, for which the Tate has a small sketch, the cathedral rising defiantly through thunder clouds while a rainbow arches overhead. Constable increasingly identified his own states of mind with these restless phenomena. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency -“the face of the World is totally changed to me”.

 

After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on, but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17^th century landscape painters.

Constable thought that “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”, and in a then new way he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: “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.”

He never went abroad and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white and yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry Fuseli was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable’s approach, for C. R. Leslie records him as saying: “I like the landscapes of Constable; he is always picturesque, of a fine colour, and the lights are always in the right places; but makes me call for my great coat and umbrella”.

Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works-“six-footers”, as he called them- he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20^th century there has been a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork.

In England, Constable had no real successor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics, such as Delacroix, or the painters of Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists.

Turner and Constable were at the Royal Academy School together but never became friends. Turner became rich and famous, while Constable only sold 20 paintings in England in his lifetime and not until he was 39 years old, denied his accolade until the age of 52-just eight years before his death. He died in London, on March 31, 1837.

All that Constable hoped to achieve through his art is summed up in a revealing comment he made in David Lucas’s English Landscape Scenery: “to increase the interest for…and study of the Rural Scenery in England with all its endearing associations, its amenities, and even in its most simple locations; abounding as it does in grandeur, and every description of Pastoral Beauty.”   

COMPARISON BETWEEN CONSTABLE AND TURNER

Both, Turner and Constable, were great landscape painters. In all of their pictures nature is the main or an important theme (Turner was also preoccupied with the Industrial Revolution and its effect on the nature and the society and, as a result painted historical and documentary scenes).
            Another point is that they were influential exponents of romanticism, an artistic movement of the late 1700’s to mid-1800’s that emphasized an emotional response to nature. Turner, who traveled extensively around Europe, often infused his dramatic seascapes and landscapes with literary or historical allusions. Constable, who never left England, preferred more straightforward depictions of placid rural scenery (in his pictures he expresses his intense love for the countryside, especially for his home county, Suffolk). Moreover, Turner’s versatility is shown in his pictures, but only in his way of painting because his main emphasis is on nature, whereas Constable tries to show the harmony of humans, animals and nature.
           Working in the studio from sketches and his imagination, Turner blended his oil paints in fluid layers of translucent color, called glazes. Constable, sometimes painting directly outdoors, applied flickering touches of thick, opaque oils. Despite their differences in temperament and technique, Turner and Constable evoke the same worship of nature that imbues the literature of their contemporaries, the romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
            While Constable’s first idols were Lorrain and Gainsborough, Turner first emulated works of van der Veldes and also Claude Lorrain.
            Another difference between them is shown in their way of painting. Turner always wanted to express moods of light and colours by dissolving the forms of natural things, whereas Constable showed the things as they are with his sketchy way of painting. Some pictures by Turner almost rival Constable in their freshness, especially when the older works of Constable are compared to Turner’s Venice pictures. In Turner's pictures representing nature described by personal impressions, one can recognize the beginnings of Early Impressionism.
           Constable had a specific way of creating, a sketchy way of painting (observes nature, makes sketches which are completed in  the studio), trying to give plain description of landscape, to show the specific atmosphere of the landscape, the   sensitivity  for original landscape, atmosphere, air, light, clouds, tries to express the effect of weather, changing light and movements of clouds. He also wants to show infinity and vastness by visualizing the real essence of things; summarizes familiar details of country life and connects them to imagination of natural universe with human, animal and landscape in original harmony. What is more, the painter identifies his state of mind with pictures (when his wife died he expressed his feelings by painting - isolation, unsettled scenes).
           In contrast with all these, Turner makes use of mystical exaggeration of scenes, is preoccupied with figures where the forms are dissolved in an onrush of light (a complete dissolution of things), but he never had that detachment from outwards reality that is now called abstract. His paintings represent not the objects of nature but the medium through which they were seen. He set up priorities on moods of colours. Consequently, single elements are shown only by colours which make the whole picture an atmospheric phenomenon by light and colour and left everything in doubt except for the positive existence of colour. His works of art are characterized by much diversity of landscape style between earlier and later works, on one side there is the Italian style with bright colours, on the other side the direct impression of the destructiveness of nature. For instance, forces of nature were expressed by the deluge or the Angels of the Apocalypse.
           The beginning of Constable’s art is marked by dark colours (traditional), Turner’s first oils are sombre in colours but with contrasted effects of light and atmospheric effects (for example storms and rainbows). Later, Constable used light, bright colours, no traditional compositions and colour principles (natural light effect). After he went to Italy, Turner was impressed by the bright colours there; he used pure colours without the conventional indication of shadows by dark, grey or brown tones. 

In their lifetime Turner was more successful, but nowadays Constable is supposed to be the better-known landscape painter.
           Finally in the Literary Gazette, a magazine in their lifetime, a critic noted: "If Mr. Turner and Mr. Constable were professors of geology, instead of painting, the first would certainly be a Plutonist, and the second a Neptunist...the one all Heat, the other all Humidity." ( Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism, The Human Context, Ontario, Canada 1988, S. 345 ).

TECHNIQUE AND CREATIONS

John Constable looked closely at the properties of shifting light and the movements of clouds, creating paeans to actual places and times of day. Like his contemporary, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Constable was a product of his times, but his work more anticipated the concerns of the Impressionists.

In 1799 when Turner was already a member of the Royal Academy, Constable entered its school as a student. Unlike Turner, Constable painted landscapes with an eye to verisimilitude. His more prosaic views of nature, following the traditions of such Dutch masters as Ruisdale and Cyp, were unfashionable. Constable was thirty-nine before he sold a picture and in his fifties before he was invited to join the Royal Academy.

Constable’s career was spent creating poetic expressions of his native Stour Valley. During the summers he would work in the village of East Bergholt, where he was born. This region of Suffolk and the Stour Valley came to be known as Constable country. There he made sketches, both painted and drawn. These “notes” would become the basis for the large and ambitious canvases that he would prepare in London for the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. Constable’s sketches of skies and sites such as Dedham Lock and Mill are regarded today as important works that capture the spirit and the feeling of the countryside, possible to attain only when the artist is working directly from nature.

One of the earliest Western European artists to study changing light and atmospheric conditions so closely, Constable kept notes in diaries recording weather conditions and times of day. In working out-of-doors, Constable was anticipating the direction that the Impressionists would later take with such conviction.

Constable, who made nature his subject, was dedicated to understanding and developing new ways to describe its mutability. The sky especially engrossed him. As he realized the importance of the sky in painting, he never treated it as a secondary thing. “The sky is the source of light in nature and governs everything”,  he remarked, and his obsession yielded the largest body of sky and cloud studies produced in Western art. He also experimented with different techniques, such as stippling the canvas with white flecks to capture the effect of wet leaves and dew, or incorporating dots of red that would make the green of the vegetation stand out and register more prominently. These attempts, like his outdoor studies, were an important inspiration to the later Impressionists.

            The death of his beloved wife, Maria, in 1828, affected Constable profoundly. His work became darker and more brooding, infused directly or indirectly with a sense of mourning. Though he was interested in the real appearance of things, he was not s dispassionate observer. His subjects had, as they did for all Romantic artists, strong personal meanings and ties; his attachment to nature was emotional as well as intellectual.

            Although recognition for his work came slowly in England, Constable gained renown more rapidly in France. His Hay Wain was seen by Gericault in London at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1821. Gericault was so impressed with the work that, at his best it was bought, it was bought by a French dealer and exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1824, where it won a gold medal. French artists such as Gericault and Delacroix admired Constable’s freedom of brushwork and the freshness of his subject matter. He was a fundamental inspiration to the French Romantics and also to the French painters of landscapes.

Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolour landscape painting. Some of his famous works are: Calais Pier, Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Speed, Burial at Sea, The Grand Canal of  Venice.

His first oils are sombre in colour, but already reveal his preoccupation with contrasted effects of light and atmospheric effects such as storms and rainbows. In 1819 he began traveling through Europe, his main centers being Venice, Rome and Naples.

           The clear light and bright colours of Italy overwhelmed him, and though his watercolours, especially those done in Venice, show him using pure colour without the conventional indication of shadows by dark grey or brown tones; his output of finished pictures for the Royal Academy slackened off considerably. Quite early in Turner’s career, his pictures were already accounted “among the vagaries of a powerful genius rather than among the representations of nature”. By the 1830s, as Charles Eastlake told Turner’s first biographer Walter Thornbury, none of Turner’s exhibited pictures could be said to be finished till he had worked on them when they were on the walls of the Royal Academy; the account continues that: “Such a magician, performing his incantations in public, was an object of interest and attraction”. “Yet, even in the most private, least-finished pictures there is never that detachment from outward reality that is now called abstract. On the contrary: he evolved with poetic freedom, the real quality of the world. In the sumptuous style that reached its height in the mid 1830s, the material of nature was translated into resounding chords of colour. The last subjects of storm and catastrophe make visible a dream of peril and endurance that is full of heroic exaltation. The elemental drama that Turner painted was both real and imaginary”.
          “The Lord of all”, as his contemporary, John Constable, named Turner, is one of the few colorists, if not the only one, who had the straightforward ambition to recompose on canvas the illusion and miracle of the aurora borealis, to suggest to us, by a simple and delicate spreading of colour, its magnificent unreality, its purifying presentiment. His aim was“ to interpret shape in motion as well as the fleeting phenomena of light”. An extraordinary master of the gradation, of colour technique, he studied thoroughly the most diverse techniques of proportion, contrast, rhythm and gradation of colour. Associated with a frenetic participation and with a deep awareness of reality, they give wings to his boundless imagination. 

ROMANTIC PAINTURE AND LITERATURE-CONNECTIONS

        

    The connection between Romantic painture and literature (especially poetry) can be reduced to one simple expression-“painting in words” as poems are pure transcriptions in verses of the meaning a painting transmits. As a result of this fact, poems represent pure imagination, passions for the absolute.

1. Turner’s paintings and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry

Turner was somehow attracted by the Classical paintings of Lorrain, representing highly suggestive ruins, pines and waterfalls. His favourite element, though, was the sea and this might be one of the reasons why art gained a large appreciation in 19^th century England, a country of navigators…He was charmed by the impetuous movement of the waves rushing towards the coast, the red eddy of the sunsets, the rays of the sun penetrating through the clouds and giving brilliance to ships’ sales (The Fighting Temeraire). The nature images painted by him have a deep significance, just as the magnificent descriptions in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner  (“The sun came up upon the left,/Out of the sea came he!/And he shone bright, and on the right/Went down into the sea.”).

            Even though this connection between these two works of art may seem strange in the beginning, it is, in fact, as between all Romantic arts there is a strong, invisible bond.

When one hears the words of the poem, an extraordinary thing happens, exactly the same that may occur when admiring some of Turner’s paintings- one cannot help but be moved and entirely engrossed by the pure essence of the poem or of the masterpiece in front of him.

The misty, strange, insecure and, at the same time, mysterious atmosphere, which almost always dominates the artist’s paintings, is to be found in the poem and has a very important role: that of maintaining the suspense , keeping arosen the reader’s interest. It also hides the unknown, the phantomless, inviting the admirer or the reader to discover what is hidden beyond words, to take a closer look, to see and understand the message and its significances (“ The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,/The furrow followed free;/We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea”).

Each symbol of the poem has a correspondent in Turner’s works: the sea represents the open space where everything becomes possible, where imagination can express itself freely, giving birth to monsters and fear, or, on the contrary, inducing a certain state of happiness (“Water, water, everywhere”); the land, where the safety is to be found, appears contrasted with the sea; the movement of the wind, of the clouds, of the waves, becomes a symbol of life, while stillness is associated with death.

            Listen or reading The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, one cannot help but become the “Wedding-guest” and as one admires a painting created by Turner, one cannot help out but be totally absorbed, entirely detached from everything around.

            Both the poem and Turner’s paintings may seem, at a first sight, easy to be understood, but have, at a second analysis, profound significances. Although created with different “instruments” (words-in the first case, and colours-in the second), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and J.M.W. Turner’s paintings represent a materialization of the artist’s thoughts and feelings and have an incredible strength , that of making the extraordinary believable. The images are of exquisite beauty, so clear and deep that they touch each one of our senses.

2. William Wordsworth’s poetry and John Constable’s paintings

Just as his contemporary, William Wordsworth rejected what he called the “poetic diction” of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of the 18^th century landscape painters, who, he declared, were always “running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand”.

            An acquaintance of Wordsworth, Constable shared his belief in the beautiful, evocative aspects of nature (which is seen, from a Romantic perspective, as an escape from reality) and in the value of the humble (For old, unhappy, far-off things,/And battles long ago/Or is it some more humble lay,/Familiar matter of to-day?/Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,/That has been, and may be again?). Both the poet and the painter shared the same belief: “The vibration of a spinney on a spring day can teach one more about people and about good and bad than the sages”. Consequently, their creations are penetrated by the ethical passion of the artist. The main theme of their creations includes a range of persons and situations never written about or painted before: the humble and rustic life taken seriously.

            Both forms of art (Wordsworth’s poems and Constable’s paintings) are dominated by the image of nature as a whole, by its life’s energy and continuous movement, its permanent transformation. The living beings (the solitary Highland Lass-“The Solitary Reaper”-in William Wordsworth’s poetry , the boy bending over the river to quench his thurst or the horses running over the wooden bridge -in the painter’s pictures) are always present and are an integrant part of nature, forming an indivisible whole.

            The atmosphere gives a sense of security, is homely and protective. The images, the descriptions and narrative passages are sometimes nostalgic or melancholic, but in most cases they inspire optimism.

            Beyond the simplicity of the incidents, people, language used by the poet or the apparently negligent structure of Constable’s paintings, there are hidden deep significances and high skills (“I listen'd, motionless and still;/And, as I mounted up the hill,/The music in my heart I bore,/Long after it was heard no more”).

                               

CONCLUSION

Both Turner and Constable were interested in understanding and revealing the permanent changes of nature (and maybe, through it, the fragility of human soul) and each of them succeeded in reaching the “perfection” in this respect.   Their creations, although similar in theme, are very different in matter of technique. They practically used the same motif-nature (in its different forms)-as main object, but “dressed it in different clothes”. The charm, magnificence and, nevertheless, the power of suggestion of their paintings stands in their originality, incomparable force and suave freshness which offer them eternal youth.

Constable feels everything that could be a connection between his soul and the universe, the eternal chain of human beings and things. “Painting is another word for feeling…” is one of his concepts in art and in life. He is considered to be the promoter of the aesthetical perception. Constable’s pictures reveal a restless and tormented soul at the thought that he will not be able to express all the depths of his consciousness.

Characterized by a fundamental simplicity in his way of feeling and a moral sobriety, Constable intends to offer durability and calm to those ephemeral, evanescent appearances. Consequently, he synthesizes the essence of his work- “My aim is to reveal the light, the dew, the breeze, the flowers’ buds, the refreshment: nothing that has ever been represented by another painter.” This is Constable’s romanticism- the visual representation of the untouchable. Yet, admiring some of his canvases, who could ever dare to deny this? His entire work can be considered as a particular example of miracle realized through art.

In Turner’s works of art, the landscape acquires all the desires of the heart; this is the infinite field of the poetic freedom and privileged encounter of feelings. He even declines being a “type” in order to become an ideal of a generation for which romanticism is not a trend, but a spring from the depth of the human nature, an excitement regarding every second of life, of sight! A real “poet of images”, Turner creates visual effects searched deep down in his imagination, not inspired by common facts. The light in his paintings is not a calm one, but in movement, full of “explosions” and all sorts of bizarre sparks.

Because he avoided being too sensitive or contemplative in his art, in order to give birth to a painting as a search for what is intimate, profoundly real and objective in nature, Turner was considered by Giuseppe Gatt the first European modern painter. All in all, he remains a genius not only through the volume and energy of his artistic creation, but due to the fact that he lives in the whole plenitude of his concepts, ideas and feelings.

      

BIBLIOGRAPHY

§  ALPATOV, MIHAI - Istoria Artei, Editura Meridiane, Bucuresti, 1967, pag. 334-344;

§  Cartea Picturii Universale - Turner, Editura Meridiane, 1979, pag. 7-20;

§  Cartea Picturii Universale-Constable, Editura Meridiane, 1977, pag. 5-24;

§  GATT, GIUSEPPE - Turner - The life and work of the artist illustrated with 80 colour plates, Thames and Hudson Publishing House, London, 1968, pag. 3-27;

§  GATT, GIUSEPPE – Constable - The life and work of the artist illustrated with 80 colour plates, Thames and Hudson Publishing House, London, 1968, pag. 3-27;

§   GRIGORESCU, DAN - Arta engleza, Editura Meridiane, 1989, pag. 278-337 ;

§  NICOLESCU, VASILE -Turner , Editura Meridiane, 1979, pag. 7-26;

§  NICOLESCU, VASILE - Constable, Editura Meridiane, 1979, pag. 7-21;

§  PICON, GAETAN - The Birth of Modern Painting, Tiger Books International PLC, London 1991, pag. 74-75, 78-79, 158-159.