Landscape Painting

On the other side of the Atlantic, landscape painting found a public, optimistic role rather different from the one it enjoyed in Europe. Yet American landscapes were still the expression of subjective feelings, still much concerned with ideas of awe and sublimity, solitude and medication, and thus remained within the main current of the Romantic movement.

Constable wrote about his method and described it as follows:

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the firs thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

In part, this is a statement of one of the principles of the Romantic movement, that the artist should turn to nature for inspiration and not take that inspiration from other artists. It is also a statement that would come in time to infuse subsequent art movements, such as the Impressionist movement. An analysis of Constable's work will show the degree to which he lived up to his artistic dictum.

At the height of the Romantic Movement, the nature of society was also changing, at different rates in different places. Britain was well into the Industrial Revolution, which was also having an effect in the United States. The way people saw themselves and their relationship to the world had changed consider

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influence of the watercolor school on the course of oil painting and can be seen in Constable's sketches made in the Lake District in 1806. Constable's full-flower came when he was 35 years of age. He would remain largely a painter of southern England, and the region of the Stour valley is now known as "the Constable country." Carlos Peacock suggests that one way to understand Constable's work is to compare his water-colors to those of Turner, for they both owed a debt to the same earlier artists but then developed in different ways. Both were also acute observers of nature, and both shared the Romantic passion for light. They did not differ in fundamentals but in the way they looked at things: With Constable it is the sensation of the moment that counts supremely, and one feels, especially in the later water-colors, that he deliberately puts imagination aside in order that the subject he is painting may be freshly seen and the mind cleared of falsifying preconceptions. For him light is the means by which reality may be heightened, by which a tree or cloud may take on some particular significance in the ordinary scale of things. What he seems to do is not to "improve" nature, not to rub off the bloom in the name of higher
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Approximate Word count = 2751
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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