John Constable: The Lectures

"Wivenhoe Park, Essex" by John Constable

"In the summer of 1833 John Constable made his début as a lecturer, taking as his subject 'An Outline of the History of Landscape Painting.' He jokingly alluded to his new role in a letter to Charles Leslie in these words, 'Remember that I play the part of Punch on Monday, at eight, at the Assembly Rooms at Hampstead.' Leslie tells us that this and the other lectures he afterwards delivered at the Royal Institution and at Worcester were never written out. Constable depended upon slight notes only, and upon copies and engravings of the pictures to which he alluded. These he found sufficient. Many of his friends urged him to commit them to paper, and perhaps he intended to amplify them at his leisure, but he never did.

In his first lecture he traced landscape art from the specimens found upon the walls of Herculaneum and Pompeii, of a purely decorative kind, through the earliest painters of the Renaissance, to the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the maturer years of the great Italian school. From thence he passed to the Poussins, Claude Lorraine, and the Flemish and Dutch masters. At this point landscape art rapidly declined and for nearly a whole century it lived upon the mannered and feeble imitations of past tradition. From this degraded state the revival of healthy landscape painting was mainly due to the English. This is a brief summary of his talk, which was afterwards developed into a series of four delivered at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.

In October 1835 Constable delivered three lectures at Worcester. In preparation for this he wrote: 'It will be more agreeable to myself to lecture in morning, as my tables and specimens can be better seen, and I hope it is now so planned... We must be early in the morning on Tuesday, so that we can get the room ready and a cloth hung up. My four sheets of double elephant [paper], about ten feet in height, and a few things besides.' One purpose of his lectures was to teach his audience that a close study of nature must come before its translation into any ideal form."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Constable, R.A." by Robert George Windsor-Clive.)