Late Constable review, Royal Academy: Dark energy meets technical mastery

The late work of the artist most associated with a Brexiteers' view of 'traditional' England can be turbulent, passionate and decisive, says Mark Hudson, but not so much as to completely rewrite his legacy

John Constable’s ‘The Leaping Horse’ features in new Royal Academy show Late Constable (Royal Academy of Arts, London)

What’s this? John Constable, the master of “conservative” British understatement represented by a turbulent black sky, with five vigorous, bordering-on-violent brushstrokes, that look positively abstract expressionist, indicating a tumultuous downpour from the heavens? For most of the past century – ie the period of the existence of “modern art” – Constable was the artist who provided mainstream Britain with reassuring images of our green and pleasant land (with the emphasis on “pleasant”) in placid evocations of the Suffolk countryside such as The Hay Wain and The Cornfield. The fact that he was safely dead – in 1837 – no doubt enhanced his popularity.

His slightly older rival Turner, meanwhile, was seen as the cosmopolitan radical, whose proto-impressionist pyrotechnics paved the way for Monet, Cezanne and even, it was argued, Rothko. Over the past decade, however, there’s been the beginnings of a reversal of that view. Shows such as the V&A’s Constable: The Making of a Master in 2015 proposed a more modern, scientifically oriented Constable, whose coolly analytical approach to nature, evident in his meticulous studies of cloud patterns, makes Turner’s visionary land and seascapes appear overly romantic and theatrical.

So will this exhibition of Constable’s late work be the one to definitively swing the battle of these 19th century giants in his favour? My gut feeling on entering was: absolutely not.

The term “late” has become a shorthand in art for the raw final stuff the artist fought to get out – often in the face of ill-health – when they no longer cared what the rest of the world thought. The late-period works of Goya, Titian and Matisse are great examples. The Constables seen here, a fine array of mostly very well-known paintings, present him – certainly at first glance – pretty much as we already either do or don’t love him.

The inclusion of two of the full-size sketches for iconic works, beside the paintings they engendered – The Leaping Horse and Hadleigh Castle – is instructive, and not in the way you might expect. To call these “sketches” is misleading: they’re full-size (six feet wide) prototype paintings, but much rawer and more immediate in their execution than the finished works. Revered by modern masters of the order of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, these, we’ve come to assume, are the works that give us the “real Constable”, while the more polished completed paintings were done, so the logic goes, to fob off an uncomprehending public who still struggled with landscape as an art form. And if you didn’t know better, you’d naturally assume they were done in situ: deep in the Suffolk countryside and beside a ruined tower on the Thames Estuary.

In fact, as the exhibition makes clear, both sketches and final works were painted in Constable’s London studio, just off Tottenham Court Road, and more or less simultaneously, as Constable gradually evolved these compositions.

Our admiration for Constable’s technical virtuosity inevitably increases: to be able to get this amount of light onto canvas, with a sense of the turbulent, precipitous energy bursting out of the English sky – and all essentially from memory – is truly staggering. Yet our sense of a more “authentic”, avant-garde Constable revealing himself through these sketches takes a dent. Sketches and finished works aren’t as different from each other as we might expect – or even hope. The Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ has a fantastic dark energy in its rough and chalky blacks, but the shimmering surfaces of the final version, intended for public exhibition, are also highly impressive.

The classic “traditional” Constable, The Cornfield, meanwhile, carries the day through sheer technical mastery. Having struggled with sales, Constable set out to create a popular masterpiece, and to modern eyes it looks like he’s laying on the rustic English idyll with a trowel: the shepherd boy drinking from a stream in the foreground, the old farmhand walking home through the cornfield, with a dark cloud hinting that even in the heart of an English summer it could piss it down at any minute. Indeed, if you want a perfectly balanced evocation of temperate English light and landscape that stays just the right side of sentimentality you won’t do better than this. Yet, ironically, for a painting that we’ve come to think of as exemplifying Little Englishness – the ultimate Brexit image, perhaps – British buyers found its matter-of-factness, the lack of historical and literary associations, “too modern”. It was the French who warmed most to the classic Constable.

A room of small works on paper shows Constable working directly from nature – or so we’d normally assume. Yet once we’ve got it into our heads that Constable can mug up just about anything in his studio, we’re suspicious of even the most informal sketch. Even the marvellously decisive storm scene from the poster – and it’s actually tiny – was probably done after the event. Two large watercolours, both definitely created in the studio, Old Sarum and Stonehenge, with its double rainbows and apocalyptic light, are genuinely great evocations of an immemorial England where ancient and modern merge, which have inspired everyone from Paul Nash to Derek Jarman.

John Constable’s ‘Rainstorm over the Sea’ (Royal Academy of Arts, London)

As the show moves on towards Constable’s final works, paintings such as A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge, c 1830-6, with its white palette knife marks slashing across the surface, and the stormy A Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833, feel as wild and uninhibited as you could wish; the latter looks as if it’s been hurled onto the canvas in a surge of passionate excitement. And whether we view them as powerful examples of proto-Expressionism or throwaway studies that the artist himself probably barely looked at once he’d done them, they are remarkable pieces of painting.

The finished works, meanwhile, the ones intended for exhibition, become ever more formulaic right up to his final moments. The Valley Farm, 1835, with its boat following oxen along a stream, and Arundel Mill and Castle, 1837, supposedly incomplete at the time of his death, have a horrible unctuous slickness in their evocation of “golden” afternoon light – a quality that’s been so imitated by bad artists it’s hard to look at even in a Constable. Far from revealing his most uncompromising visions, the “late” Constable (he died unexpectedly of a heart attack aged 60) seems to have been most interested in gaining the acceptance of the Royal Academy, an institution that took little interest in him.

Taking place, poignantly, in that very building, this fascinating exhibition gives a more rounded impression of this reluctant rebel than I’ve encountered before. The questions of whether Constable was essentially modern or traditional, conservative or radical are a lot muddier than we’ve tended to think, and all bound up with matters of finish and preparation and how the artist wanted his work to be seen. Nowadays in the age of fragmentation and deconstruction, we accept every last piece of background material as part of “the work”, but Constable, as an early 19^th century man, doubtless didn’t see it like that.

30 Oct until 13 Feb