John Constable, “Landscape with Double Rainbow”, 1812, Oil Sketch on Paper on Canvas, 33.7 x 38.4 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk. Largely self-taught, he was a probationer in 1799; and in 1800, he became a student at the Royal Academy schools. Constable exhibited from 1802 at the Royal Academy in London, and later at the Paris Salon. He was influenced by Dutch artists such as paitner and etcher Jacob van Ruisdael, generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age. The works of Peter Paul Rubens and Claude Gellée also proved to be influencial to Constable for their color use and composition.
For a student trained in the British Royal Academy at the turn of the 18th century, landscape was lower in the hierarchy of genres than biblical and historical subjects. John Constable was drawn to local landscapes rather than classic Mediterranean ones, and rather than transforming these into grand mythologies or allegories, he painted them using scientific methods of observation drawn from new fields like meteorology. Constable’s sketches were the firt ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air.
John Constable used oil sketches to record the subtle effects of light and changes in the weather. This approach of his would later influence artists like those of the emerging French Impressionists. Sketches Constable did in Hamstead, England, which at that time was just a rural village outside of London, show storm clouds gathering or light piercing the atmosphere. His painting “Landscape with a Double Rainbow”, seen above, is dominatied by a deep blue sky and shows an unusual atmospheric event not fully understood by early 19th century science.
When compared to the varnished paintings of the predominant academic style, John Constable’s canvases, composed of quick, broken brush strokes, were considered by comtemporary critics and most viewers to be “unfinished”. Constable’s 1821 completed painting “The Hay Wain” was shown at the Royal Academy and did not attract much attention. However, “The Hay Wain”, when shown with his other works, at the Paris Salon of 1824 earned a gold medal. The French Impressionists at that time, such as Delacroix and Géricault, were just beginning to gain prominence and challenge the early 19th century critics.