East Bergholt Essex United Kingdom

John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable.

His father is a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex.

Golding Constable also owns his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moors at Mistley on the Stour estuary and uses to transport corn to London.

He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman.

Although Constable is his parents' second son, his older brother is mentally handicapped and so John is expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he had been enrolled in a day school in Dedham.

Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.

In his youth, Constable had embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk and Essex countryside that is to become the subject of a large proportion of his art.

He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which had inspired Constable.

Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he had been introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.

In 1799, Constable had persuaded his father to let him pursue art, and Golding had even granted him a small allowance.

Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he had attended life classes and anatomical dissections as well as studying and copying Old Masters.

Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael.

He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist.

By 1803, he is exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy.

In 1802 he had refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College, a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counseled would mean the end of his career.

In that year, Constable had written a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter.

His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, color and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain.

Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, are unfashionable in an age that looks for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.

He does, however, make occasional trips further afield.

For example, in 1803 he spends almost a month aboard the East Indiaman ship Coutts as it visits southeast coastal ports.

John Constable had undertaken a two-month tour of the Lake District in 1806, but he will tell his friend and biographer Charles Leslie that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits.

In order to make ends meet, Constable has taken up portraiture, which he finds dull work—though he executes many fine portraits.

He also paints occasional religious pictures.

Constable has adopted a routine of spending the winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in the summer.

In 1811, he had first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape are to inspire some of his greatest paintings.

John Constable’s childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell has developed from 1809 onward into a deep, mutual love, but their engagement in 1816 is opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who considers the Constables his social inferiors and threatens Maria with disinheritance.

Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, a solicitor, is reluctant to see Maria throw away this inheritance, and Maria herself points out that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances John has of making a career in painting.

Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, hold out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable is financially secure; but they had died in quick succession, and Constable has inherited a fifth share in the family business.

John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating) is followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast, where the sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulate Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant color and vivacious brushwork.

At the same time, a greater emotional range begins to register in his art.

John Constable, mourning his wife Maria, who had died of tuberculosis the previous November, completes his gloomy painting of “Hadleigh Castle”, finding little consolation in the Royal Academy’s finally admitting him to full membership in February 1829 at the age of 52.

Although Constable is greatly admired in France, the Academy had long considered landscape painting a minor genre.

Intensely saddened by his loss, Constable will hereafter dress always in black, and will care for his seven children alone for the rest of his life.

Shortly before her death, Maria's father had died leaving her twenty thousand pounds.

Constable has speculated disastrously with this money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes ready for a publication.

Hesitant and indecisive, he nearly falls out with his engraver, and even when the folios are published, Constable cannot interest enough subscribers.