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| By John Constable - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, |
In
this fine painting, Constable brings the countryside under control in
a cultivated estate suggesting the wealth and status of the owners of
Wivenhoe Park.
John
Constable (1776-1837) imparted to the beautiful Stour Valley in
Suffolk, the enduring legend, "Constable Country." His
beautiful and fairly objective paintings of nature eschewed the
idealised approaches to landscape paintings of his time.
Constable
left mythology and history to his contemporaries and, instead, he
painted nature more or less as it was, painstakingly recording every
detail of the glorious English countryside, animals, agriculture and
labour, although, as discussed below, certain techniques he used may
be considered a little contrived.
Wivenhoe
Park, Essex
Wivenhoe
Park, Essex, is
painted in greenish, cool tones and its size, 55 x 100cm, suited it
well for hanging on the wall of a large, impressive house, which was,
in fact, its destiny, since it was commissioned as a country house
portrait. This might seem strange, since the house in the
painting - although it is set at the important, central point of the
picture - is actually indistinct through distance. Horizontally, it
takes up less than 1/23 of the canvass. Only the careful composition
of the painting leads the eye, via the fence, to the reflection
across the lake, which guides it through the trees to the house
itself. However, it should be borne in mind that the park is as
important for advertising the status of the owners as the house
itself.
E.H.
Gombrich quotes in Art
and Illusion,
a well-known anecdote about Constable: "The story goes that a
friend remonstrated with him for not giving his foreground the
requisite mellow brown of an old violin and that Constable,
thereupon, took a violin and put it before him on the grass to show
the friend the difference between the fresh grass as we see it and
the warm tones demanded by convention."
In
this painting of Wivenhoe
Park,
Constable is certainly making his point, and succeeds in achieving
the feeling of depth required without resorting to the conventional
process of using muted tones in the foreground, as had formerly been
the practice, although it would be true to say the foreground does
contain some brown tones. In most other respects, he observes
carefully the conventions of the day in attempting to reproduce an
impression that is close to nature. Constable carefully copied from a
drawing book of Alexander Cozens his schemata for clouds and the sky
in Wivenhoe
Park is
clearly of the style adopted by the artist.
Touches
of Colour and Contrast
Constable's
painterly style suits his subject, bringing out the softness of the
scene before him. Small touches of colour and contrast relieve the
uniformity of the green and yellows, for instance, the dark and white
hues of the cattle. The bright, red clothing of one of the figures in
the boat echoes the warm reflection of the sun on the lake. The white
swans also give some relief, carrying the eye across from the group
of cattle to the small boat and figures. The smallness of the
animals and human figures helps to make the painting tranquil and
uncrowded; they are just incidental parts of nature's whole.
This
is a true-to-life representation, although, maybe, slightly
contrived. For example, pastures are not normally, quite so
perfectly, uniformly, green and sunlit yellow. There would be,
somewhere, a small scruffy patch of scrub wherever there are cattle
grazing.
The lighting and colours indicate that this may be a morning
scene, with the sunlit patch across the middle of the lake and the
clouds shown against the blue backdrop of the sky. With the horizon
line about half-way up the painting, it is as though the viewer is
standing directly in front of the scene.
This
painting is exactly what it seems to be, a self-contained,
comfortable, grand, but nonetheless, domestic scene,
representing nature as it is, yet somehow, under the control of
powerful human influences.
Sources:
-
Grombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion, Phaidon Press Ltd, 1993 (First Published 1960)
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