The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

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The contemporary reception of Constable’s paintings cannot be easily explained
in terms of a conjunction of poetry and science. instead, what was recognized in both
Britain and France was their truth to nature – all that differed was the way these two
peoples appreciated that truth. Constable’s historical importance is that his paintings,
particularly his six- foot paintings, in their immediate reception were disjunctive.
They registered a separation between poetic expression and realistic observation that
surprised. For those on the side of poetry they failed to satisfy expectation; for others,
their naturalism engaged an emergent mode of visibility awaiting conscious articulation
and material instantiation. in Rancière’s terms, Constable’s paintings worked, on the
one hand, to loosen an existing bond between practices of making, seeing and saying,
namely image and poetry, and, on the other hand, if unintentionally, to begin the ties
of a new bond between image and the empirical world. Constable’s six- foot paintings
were at odds with both existing and emergent modes of visibility; connected to each
but neither properly one nor the other. This explains why Brockedon was wrong –
post- Constable art history does not teem with imitators. in short, Constable’s six- foot
landscapes can be understood as transformational in that they mediated the traversal
between essentially different modes of visibility and the registration of a new ambition
for painting.
France appears to have been more attuned to the artistic potential of realism than
its neighbour across the channel^9 and Constable is commonly credited with influencing
both the Barbizon school of painters and subsequently the impressionists.^10 and it
is the subsequent trajectory of painting that has shaped much interpretation and
appreciation of Constable’s art, as can be seen in a preference for his sketches and
preparatory works over his six- foot canvases. For example:

The directness of his large sketch of the Haywain [...] was modified in the

final picture which now seems dull by comparison but needed ‘finish’ to be

acceptable. Constable’s enormous respect for facts – light flickering on foliage,

heavy spirals of cumulus cloud – is in his sketches conveyed speedily and

essentially.

(levey 1968: 268)

The finished picture sometimes established a certain compromise between this

vitality [of the larger preparatory studies] and the more static and traditional

qualities of finish.

(gaunt 1964: 136)

in the same vein, Constable is also projected as an innovator who needed to, ‘discard
the conventions of which landscape had acquired a large store ...’ (gaunt 1964: 132),
leading to the production of work that brought about, ‘a renewal: his art marks the
beginning of a radically new approach to painting which was eventually to lead to
modern art’ (Wilson 1979: 83).