The landscape was his mistress

‘Constable was a clay-heeled plodder–he was the tortoise and Turner was the hare’

IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of becoming a painter’. Constable was then about to turn 26 and optimistic of becoming a noted artist. What he had no way of knowing was how tortuous a path he was to follow (‘Born to paint a happier land’, January 5).

Constable’s merits seem so obvious to modern viewers that it is hard to imagine how his contemporaries could be blind to them. We laud his fidelity to Nature, the way he made it into a living thing and that he treated it with barely suppressed passion.