rough and fresh to our modern eye, but it is astonishing
how much time, effort and money he poured into these
when he never intended to show them. X-rays of the
paintings show that he was often working on them
concurrently to the exhibition paintings. In other words,
they weren’t preliminary sketches that he would complete
and then move on from in the traditional sense but
functioned as problem-solving devices for the duration
of the project.
For all his nostalgia for his idyllic boyhood, Constable
was a ground-breaking revolutionary, a rebel in Jane
Austen society. In his day, the establishment prized
landscapes that emulated painters such as Claude
Lorrain, which depicted scenes from classical mythology
with polished beauty. The Royal Academy looked for muted
colours and delicate handling. Constable broke with
tradition by painting everyday life in the country. He painted
with jagged, raw brushstrokes, sometimes using a palette
knife to apply paint directly to the surface of the canvas,
and he mixed the dazzlingly bright colours he saw in
nature. The great French painter Eugène Delacroix is said
to have rushed home to repaint all his pictures after an
affecting encounter with Constable’s work.
The Leaping Horse, which is in the Royal Academy of
Art’s permanent collection today, is the sixth and final
painting of the River Stour six-footers and arguably the
most powerful. It is the pictorial and emotional climax of
the series. Over a small wooden bridge on the towpath
immediately above the sluice, a three-foot high wooden
barrier had been constructed to prevent cattle straying.
Local Suffolk barge horses were specially trained to leap
over such barriers – and this is precisely what we can
see happening in the painting.© VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON. BEQUEATHED BY HENRY VAUGHAN