John Constable & British Landscape Painting
A personal journey to the places where Constable painted
The first thing I ever learnt about the artist John Constable was a little trick he used in his paintings to bring his landscapes to life: amid the many shades of green, brown and blue of the earth and sky, he’d place dashes of red paint to add resonance to the scene.
Take his most well-known painting The Hay Wain, painted in 1821. Among the flecks of brown and green brush marks, the saddles for the three horses in centre of the composition are all painted in red.
These red dashes have the effect of subtly disrupting the flow of nature’s colours, silently upsetting the emphasis on earthy tones.
After I learned about this little trick with the red paint, I took a deeper interest in John Constable, a 19th century British landscape artist. I looked out for the red dots in all the paintings of his I saw, and sure enough, they were present in every one I came across.
The The Hay Wain became one of Constable’s most successful paintings after it was shown in the Salon in Paris in 1824, where it was singled out for a…
