John Constable: From Sketch to Finished Work

"Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames - Morning after
a Stormy Night, 1829" by John Constable

"Constable's sketches include studies from nature showing motifs such as a portion of landscape and various effects of light, shade or weather. Some sketches were made in the studio as a first draft for a composition – however, Constable was unique in making full-size studio sketches in preparation for an exhibition painting, like his full-scale oil sketch for The Hay Wain. Studies made directly from nature were sometimes revised later in the studio – provided with a sufficient level of finish, they were judged to be suitable for exhibition and sale. 

When working outdoors, Constable painted on fragments of canvas, millboard or homemade paper. As he explained to a friend in 1825, his oil sketches 'were done in the lid of my box on my knees as usual'. In his open-air oil sketches, Constable applied colour in a variety of ways – rich impasto (thickly applied paint) and glazes (translucent oil paint), heavy dots of bright colour and light touches of pure white. Quick strokes with a brush bearing only a small amount of paint gave a dappled 'dry brush' effect, allowing the colours underneath to show through.

Constable transformed the genre of oil sketching from one used for recording landscape motifs to a means of capturing transient effects of light and weather. When his daughter Isabel gave the oil sketches remaining with the family to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1888, they were aptly described by a reviewer in the London Standard as 'brilliant transcriptions of the thing of the moment – Nature caught in the very act'."

To be continued

(Shared from a blogpost on the Victoria & Albert Museum: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/john-constables-sketches/ )