Constable: The Making of a Master review – a feast of a show

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/15/constable-the-making-of-a-master-review

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What a feast of an exhibition. Constable: The Making of a Master at the V&A places the painter among the landscape artists he admired and drew from – Poussin and Claude, Rubens and Ruisdael – as well as pieces by the British painters, draughtsmen and watercolourists he copied and collected all his life. The result is a revelation, showing Constable was doing far more than describing and recording his own locale.

In later years, he slept in his attic bedroom surrounded by other people’s images: a Rembrandt etching of trees, a brisk little Gainsborough sketch, a blotted ink drawing by Alexander Cozens, and many more. Constable used other people’s paintings as models throughout his career – as teaching aids, as inspiration, and as goads to his own ambition.

A big Constable show is always well worth seeing (whatever one thinks of the word “master”). So well do we think we know his landscapes that we might not feel much resistance when we look at them. It is likely that we almost don’t look at all. Constable’s paintings rarely seem to us as modern or as wild as Turner’s and – though Constable had lots of pithy things to say, and thought deeply about painting – he would make an unlikely and perhaps even boring subject for a biopic. Constable would never, as Turner did, tie himself to a ship’s mast to experience the storm. Instead, any biopic would have to have him peering down at a patch of roadside dock leaves, staring up at the clouds passing over Hampstead, or, for high drama, painting the offshore colliers holding the tide on a stormy day at Brighton.

His was not an overtly dramatic art. But nor was he the chocolate-box-and-jigsaw-puzzle coach tour of Constable country painter the heritage industry makes him out to be. He painted the things he knew. Knowing things and painting them are different. The things you think you know you almost never see. The familiar becomes invisible. But for Constable, it was important to know the difference between a local plough and one designed to turn heavier clay soil, and to distinguish between different kinds of windmill, not to mention varieties of clouds, painting them as they passed rapidly overhead. He thought of painting as a science, a way of understanding the world.

From early on, Constable was learning not just how to paint, but how to be himself. This meant learning how to see things directly, how light falls and shadows are cast, and how things – a gnarly tree trunk, a rotted post in the current of a river, a water meadow or a barge – declare their presence. Sometimes Constable would sketch a scene in half an hour. In his larger, later compositions, those half hours would stretch into weeks, condensing time and changing atmosphere and light into a kind of perpetual static moment. You can feel the pressure and density even in the paint itself, its coagulation, the knife scrapes, the branch that is always bending, the water always glimmering on the sill, the moorhen that is always startled, the weather always coming in, and the cloud always about to bring rain.

Inevitably, Constable’s work was more than the product of what met his eye. He once declared: “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.” But that ambition is impossible. Striving to see things afresh with one’s own eyes and to understand them as a painter has nothing to do with innocence, much less ignorance. If he had never seen a picture, he would have never known what painting was. You would have to have him staring into the painting box he carried about with him as if it were some strangely foreign picnic box. What are all those oils and colours, knives and brushes for?

Famously, Constable once remarked that a self-taught painter is taught by a very ignorant person. He learned from other painters, transmuting classical compositions with rivers running through fanciful arcadian landscapes into views of the Dedham Vale and the Stour. He used Rubens’ Landscape by Moonlight and a formula by Da Vinci (on how to paint figures around a nocturnal fire) in the construction of his own moonlit scene, with Hadleigh church and a river.

Paintings beget paintings, as they always do, and Constable’s influences and affinities stayed with him, returning in curious ways. I wonder if the stars in that Rubens nocturne, which shine as flagrant white dots even on the dark foliage of the trees, return in the steely-white highlights that seem to scatter over everything in several versions of Constable’s 1824-5 The Leaping Horse?

Other people’s art was as much a part of his experience as the places in rural Suffolk that had formed him and to which he returned throughout his life. What Constable experienced included a world of images, the painted and drawn, the engraved and the etched. The art of others helped him to see, interpret, compose and record the things about him – a distant view, an avenue of elms or an oak, a Suffolk plough, a river by moonlight.

Constable’s visual world was as mediated as ours. He knew his paintings existed among other paintings, as images among images. Painters learn from what they reject, as much as from what they emulate and go beyond. Constable died two years before Daguerre’s first experiments with photography, which changed everything. But for painters, the photograph just added another layer of images. What would Constable have made of them? He would probably have noted that his paintings could see more, and give a better account of the world, with more presence.

At the end of this exhibition hangs Constable’s magnificent little 1824 Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree. To its left hangs a 1638 wash and ink study of an oak, by Claude Lorrain, which Constable used as a compositional model. But it’s clear he had stood in front of the elm, just as he had looked at Lorrain’s drawing. The elm has a presence we might nowadays describe as photographic. To the right of this pair hangs Lucian Freud’s 2003 etching After Constable’s Elm. Freud said he would have found it “completely impossible” to paint such a tree from nature. So he drew it on an etching plate, copying Constable. It has its own presence. It is an elm tree. It is a Freud. It is after a Constable that looks back to Lorrain. They are all images among images, presences among presences.

• Constable: The Making of a Master is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7, from 20 September to 11 January. Details: vam.ac.uk