John Constable, perhaps the greatest and most original of all British landscape artists, is renowned especially for his views of the Stour Valley in Suffolk, Salisbury Cathedral and Hampstead Heath. He was brought up in the country, and out of his deep love for the English landscape grew a determination to record its beauty: to capture its moistness, light and atmosphere, as well as its shapes and colours.

Today, Constable's genius is acknowledged throughout the world, but during his own lifetime, landscape painting was unfashionable, and the artist was forced to struggle for recognition. He was 39 before he sold his fast landscape. And although his magnificent paintings were acclaimed in France, the Royal Academy in London refused him full membership until 1829 just eight years before his death.

A Countryman in London 

 

When he chose art as a profession, Constable left his Suffolk home to live permanently in London. But his bonds with East Anglia remained strong, and he returned each summer to sketch and paint. 

John Constable was born in East Bergh°lt in Suffolk on 11 June 1776, the fourth of his parents' six children. His father Golding was a prosperous corn merchant who owned wind- and water-mills in East Bergholt and nearby Dedham, together with land in the village and his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. Constable was brought up with all the advantages of a wealthy, happy home.

Most of his 'careless boyhood', as he called it, was spent in and around the Stour valley. After a brief period at boarding school in Lavenham, where the boys received more beatings than les-sons, he was moved to a day school in Dedham. There the schoolmaster indulged Constable's interest in drawing, which was encouraged in a more practical way by the local plumber and glazier, John Dunthorne, who took him on sketching expeditions. 

Golding Constable was not enthusiastic about his son's hobby, but gave up the idea of educating him for the church and decided instead to train him as a miller. John spent a year at this work and, though he never took to the family business, he did acquire a thorough knowledge of its technicalities. When his younger brother Abram eventually came to run the business, he often consulted John about repairs to the mill machinery. 

FIRST SIGHT OF A MASTERPIECE 

Constable's passion for art was decisively stimulated by Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter and art fanatic, whom he met in 1795. Beaumont 

owned a French masterpiece, Hagar and the Angel, by Claude Lorrain, which he took with him wher-ever he went, packed in a specially-made travel-ling box. The sight of this picture convinced Const-able of his vocation as an artist. Soon afterwards, on a trip to London, he began to take lessons from the painter 'Antiquity Smith', an eccentric charac-ter who gave him sound advice and introduced him to the world of professional painting. 

By 1799 Golding Constable's reluctance to allow his son to pursue his unprofitable and scarcely re-spectable career was tempered by the fact that a younger brother, Abram, was showing promise as a miller and businessman. So Constable was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools and his departure was blessed by his father with a small allowance.

In London Constable was a hardworking and committed student, who spent his evenings reading and making drawings, but he was homesick for his friends and family in Suffolk, and also for its countryside. For a while he shared rooms with another student, Ramsay Reinagle, who painted his portrait (title page), but Constable became disgusted with his sly copying of Old Masters and his doubtful dealings in the art market. His morale. was not improved by the discovery that landscape and landscape painters were held in very low esteem by the Academy, which only respected history and portrait painting. 

Letters and baskets of food transported by the family ship kept him in constant contact with East Bergholt, and he spent many of his summer holidays there, using a cottage near his parents' house as a studio. He also did some travelling around England. In 1801 he toured the Peak District in Derbyshire and two years later made a short sea voyage from London to Deal in Kent aboard an East Indian man.

A LONG, FRUSTRATING COURTSHIP  

During the next seven years the unhappy couple were often parted and sometimes forbidden even to write, but throughout their long, frustrating courtship they remained loyal to each other. Con-stable, who felt badly isolated in London, was sustained by his family, all of whom wished to see him married to Maria, and by the Rev John Fisher, a nephew of the Bishop of Salisbury, one of his earliest patrons. Without a strong vein of obstinacy in his character, Constable would not have survived these difficult years, though they also sharpened his ten-dency to suffer from depression and moodiness. He gained a reputation for being hostile, arrogant and sarcastic in his professional dealings, which did not help to sell his pictures. On the other hand, 

John ConstableeRevd FisheriFitzwilliam Museum with his family and close friends, he was unfailingly generous and affectionate. In fact, his make-up was in many ways contradictory. He was, for example, a die-hard reactionary in his politics, viewing the prospect of Reform with alarm, but in his art he was distinctly radical. 

While courting Maria, he fell into a regular pattern of work. He would spend the late autumn, winter and early spring in London, working up his sketches from nature and preparing his paintings for the Royal Academy exhibition, which opened each May. Then he would go down to East Bergholt for the summer and early autumn, escaping the city with relief. In 1815 Mrs. Constable died, which was a great blow to him. Not long after, Maria's mother died too. These sad events seem to have strengthened the couple's resolve and by the February of 1816 they had made up their minds to marry in defiance of all opposition. Then in May, Constable's father died, sitting peacefully in his chair. 

A Lifelong Romance 

Constable's love for Maria Bicknell (right) was a guiding passion in his life. He had known her since childhood, and the sketch below is thought to be a portrait of Maria as a young girl. When they fell in love in 1809, Constable's income was meager, and Maria's family opposed their engagement. The lovers were forced to wait seven years until he could afford to support them both. And while the marriage was happy, it was doomed to be short. At the age of 40, Maria died of TB, leaving a heartbroken husband to bring up their seven young children.

His will, Abram was to take over the firm and pay John his share of some E200 a year. Added to his allowance and his earnings from painting, this made marriage possible at last. 

Constable wrote to Dr Rhudde, seeking his con-sent for the final time. He did not reply, but confined himself to a frosty bow from his coach, which was reinforced by a huge grin of congratulation on the face of his coachman above. At the last moment, Constable astounded Maria by trying to delay the wedding, while he worked on a painting, but on 2 October they were married in St Martin-in-the-Fields by his friend Fisher, now an archdeacon. None of the Bicknell family attended. 

They enjoyed a long and happy honeymoon, returning to London in December. By the spring of the next year Maria was pregnant, having already suffered a miscarriage and Constable arranged for them to move into larger lodgings. He chose a house in Keppel Street in Bloomsbury, which appealed to him because it overlooked fields and ponds. There was even a pig farm near the British Museum to remind them of Suffolk. In these rustic surroundings their first son was born in 1817.

Marriage and fatherhood seemed to release in Constable new powers of creativity, and he was soon at work on his 'six-footers', the large scenes of the River Stour, which were to become his best-loved masterpieces. The family now enjoyed a settled way of life, dominated each spring by the exhibition of these big canvases, which slowly added to the growth of his reputation.

SKETCHES FOR THE HAY WAIN 

In 1820 he began his oil sketch of the picture that was to be The Hay Wain the wain itself gave him much trouble and he finally had to ask Johnny Dunthorne, the son of his old friend, to supply him with an accurate drawing. He finished 

III the rxhthhon fiercely to have their pictures hung in prominent positions Constable chose the large format of his 'six-foot-', canvases to make paintings stand out aid catch the eye of purchasers. 

it in the April of the following year soon after his second son was born. It has become his most famous picture, though it made little impact in Eng-land at the time of its original exhibition, and was eventually bought by a French dealer. Maria's health had always been delicate and in 1821 Constable settled his family into a house in Hampstead where the air was cleaner.

For his own use, he rented a room and a little shed from the village glazier. Standing some 400 feet above the smoke of London, Hampstead was at that time a farming area, with sand and gravel workings. Along with the Stour valley and Salisbury, it be-came one of the few landscapes Constable responded to creatively. In 1824 the king of France awarded him, in his absence, a gold medal for The Hay Wain. And for the first time his six-footer of the season, The Lock, was bought for the asking price while on exhibition at the Royal Academy.

MARIA'S TRAGIC ILLNESS 

Tragically, just as it looked as if he might be achieving professional independence, the first signs of his wife's fatal illness, pulmonary tuberculosis, showed themselves. To restore her health, he sent her and their young children, now four in number, to Brighton for the summer. Constable joined them for a few weeks and painted a number of marine scenes. The next two years saw the birth of two more children, but no improvement in Maria's health. And the birth, in January 1828, of her seventh child weakened Maria badly.

In March her father died, leaving her £20,000 and putting an end at last to their money worries. But Maria's coughing worsened, she grew feverish at nights and throughout the summer she wasted away. Maria died on 23 November and was buried in Hampstead. Constable told his brother Golding, 'I shall never feel again as I have felt, the face of the world

is totally changed to me'. The marriage for which he had waited so long had lasted a mere 12 years.

He slowly picked up the threads of his professional life. Ironically, he was elected a full Academician the next February, though by only one vote. His great rival Turner brought the news, and stayed talking with him late into the night. In time, new projects began to interest him, notably the publication of engravings taken from his paintings and oil sketches.

But the period of his greatest achievements was over. In 1835 he painted The Valley Farm, another view of Willie Lott's cottage in Flatford, which appears in the Hay Wain. This was his last major picture of Suffolk. The buyer wanted to know if it had been painted for anyone in particular. 'Yes sir', Constable told him. 'It is painted fore very particular person - the person for whom I have all my life painted.' He died at night on 31 March 1837 and was buried beside Maria in Hampstead.
 

 Writer-Marshall Cavendish

Vincent Van Gogh

One of the most original artists ever, Vincent van Gogh worked as an evangelist before taking up painting at the age of 27. He was largely self-taught, but absorbed the inspiring lessons of Impressionism during two years in Paris. Then he moved alone to Arles in the south of France, where he painted the landscapes, still-lives and portraits which became his most famous works. 

Art dealer with a business in  the hague which he had merged with the Paris based internationally frim of goupil & Co. when  Vincent left school at the age of 16, uncle cent found him a job in the hauge of fice and he worked there stedily for four years with a short stint in the Brussels branch but this transferred to London where he fell disastrously in love with his landlady daughter this after affected his ability to work and he was dismissed .in 1876 van goah returned to England as an un paid assistant at a private school in ramsgate

when  Vincent left school at the age of 16, uncle cent found him a job in the hauge of fice and he worked there stedily for four years with a short stint in the Brussels branch but this transferred to London where he fell disastrously in love with his landlady daughter this after affected his ability to work and he was dismissed .in 1876 van goah returned to England as an un paid assistant at a private school in ramsgate.

After a few months the school moved to London, and he was given the job of collecting overdue school fees in some of the city's poorest areas. It was his first real view of urban squalor and what he saw so distressed him that he could not bring him-self to collect a penny. He was dismissed again. But the experience of poverty awakened a religious zeal in Van Gogh, who now followed his father's example by becoming an assistant preacher to a Methodist minister. He enjoyed this work enormously, and after a few months he re-turned to Holland to train formally for the minis-try.

 

A GIFT TO THE POOR  

The poverty Vincent found there was even worse than in London. He threw himself into his work with a selfless fervour, interpreting Christ's message to 'give to the poor' so literally that he even gave his warm clothes away, and ate almost no-thing. His superiors were appalled by his 'excessive' zeal. They were also dismayed by his appearance, which they felt brought disrespect on his calling.

Introduction to Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Diirer was the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. He experimented in many media, and is as well-known for his delicate watercolors of animal and plant life as for the dramatic woodcuts and exquisite engravings on religious themes which brought him fame in his own time. His art is a blend of Northern and Southern traditions, profoundly influenced by the Venetian painting he saw during his visits to the city. 

Durer was an independent man, proud of his appearance and very sure of his talent. Intelligent and cultured, he mixed with humanists and scholars, while his patrons included the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. A religious man throughout his life, in later years he became increasingly preoccupied with the advent of the Lutheran Reformation. He died in 1528 and was buried in his home town of Nuremberg.

Albrecht Durer was born on 21 May 1471, in the south German city of Nuremberg. His father, a goldsmith from Hungary, had married Barbara Holper, his master's daughter, who went on to bear him eighteen children, of which Albrecht was the third.

As a child, Durer attended a local Latin school, where he first met Willibald Pirckheimer, a young nobleman, who was to become a famous Humanist scholar and Dtirer's lifelong friend and correspondent. For three years after leaving school [hirer followed custom and studied the goldsmith's trade in his father's workshop. Already he displayed signs of his wondrous artistic talent. In the memoir he wrote shortly before his death, Darer recalled: 'My father took special pleasure in me, for he saw that I was eager to know how to do things and so he taught me the goldsmith's trade, and though I could do that work as neatly as you could wish, my heart was more for painting. I raised the whole question with my father, and he was far from happy about it, regretting all the time wasted, but just the same he gave in'. the Nuremberg painter Michael Wolgemut, master of the old late medieval style.

In 1490, at three years in Wolgemut's studio, Dtirer set off the traditional German 'bachelor's year', a pen of wandering from city to city when life could explored before settling down and accepti family responsibilities.

He travelled through much of what was the Holy Roman Empire, and after two arrived in Colmar in Alsace, now a Germs speaking part of France. There he had hoped meet Martin Schongauer, the greatest Germ engraver of the previous generatic Unfortunately, Schongauer had died only Mont before Durer's arrival. Nonetheless, he stay with the dead master's brother and no dot learned from him some of the technical secrets was later to use in his own work. Darer al worked for publishers in Basel and Strasboui designing woodcut illustrations for Bibles other books.

In 1493, his father arranged a marriage for hi with the daughter of a local coppersmith, a 8 named Agnes Frey. Darer sent home a marvello painted portrait of himself, then aged twenty two which is the first independent self-portrait painted only for the artist's personal satisfaction in the whole of European art. In it he appears a handsome if unusual looking youth, adorned in what today would be called fashionable, flamboyant clothes, proud of his long blond tresses and even prouder of his painterly skill. Darer returned to Nuremberg to be married in the spring of 1494. We know little of his wife's personality, though Pirckheimer complained in later years that she was 'nagging, shrewish, and greedy'.

Within months of his marriage Durer left his wife in Nuremberg and set off on his first journey to Italy, using money borrowed from Pirckheimer's family. 

JOURNEY TO ITALY

  

There was plague in Nuremberg at the time and this may have been the young artist's motive for leaving the city. Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that Durer was powerfully attracted by what he must have heard, during his earlier travels, of the feats of the new Italian masters of painting and drawing. German artists, he said, were 'unconscious as a wild, uncut tree', whereas the Italians had rediscovered two hundred years ago the art revered by the Greeks and Romans'.

There were no carriage facilities for long-distance travel at that time and the journey over the Alps on horseback must have been a perilous one. On his way Durer recorded his impression of the mountain scenery in a series of brilliant watercolors. In Pavia he visited Pirckheimer, who was completing his studies at the great university there, and through him Outer came to know of the work of the Italian Humanists, whose scientific curiosity and independence of mind appealed to him strongly.

The highlight of his journey was Venice. With his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and his customary diligence, Durer set himself to learn all that contemporary Italian masters could teach him. He studied the science of perspective and the portrayal of the nude. He copied the works of Mantegna and other engravers, and argued over the various theories of art with the sociable circle of Venetian painters.

When he returned home the following year he brought with him the rudiments of the Italian Renaissance and the ambition to transplant them to his native northern soil. He made a living from his woodcuts and engravings, often single sheet designs which his wife and mother would hawk in the public markets and fairs, and which were carried all over Europe by the town's travelling merchants.

These were tumultuous years in central Europe. Many preachers foretold the world would end in the year 1500. These feelings of doom were brilliantly summed up in Durer's illus-tractions to The Apocalypse of St. John (1498), his first masterwork.

Although they were printed with a text at the famous press of his godfather, Anton Koberger, in Nuremberg, Darer insisted that his own name appear as the publisher. This was part of his lifelong campaign to raise the status of the artist in northern Europe and to secure recognition for his own genius. Two years later he painted another self-portrait, facing the viewer directly in a pose deliberately reminiscent of Christ .

The portrait displays the pride and self-consciousness of a man who was by then well aware of his own unique artistic destiny.

In the years that followed, Diirer slowly digested the lessons of his Italian journey and produced a remarkable variety of work. Some commissions for painting came in from burghers and aristocrats, including the powerful Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. But it was his woodcuts and increasingly his engravings on copperplate which spread his fame and earned him the independence he so desperately craved.

In the late summer of 1505 Darer headed south once again. He had received a commission to paint an altarpiece for the wealthy association of German merchants in Venice. This time he settled in the great island city for more than a year. By then his engravings were well-known in Italy and tributes flowed from other artists as well as from such eminent men as the Doge and Patriarch of Venice, both of whom visited his studio. Durer was determined to show the Venetians that he was not only a clever draughtsman but also a master of colour and paint equal to the enigmatic Giorgione, whose haunting images were then causing a tremendous stir. It was, however, the aged Giovanni Bellini, the grand master of the previous generation, whose work Durer most admired. When the 80-year-old Bellini visited Diirer in his studio and praised his work, it was a proud moment for the young German artist, then 35 years of age.

Darer enjoyed Venetian life, the company of other artists, the food and wine and the beauty of the city. Most of all he enjoyed the respect accorded by the Italians to their artists, in sharp contrast to the penny-pinching ways of the German burghers. 'How I shall shiver for the sun,' he wrote, contemplating his return, 'Here I am a gentleman, at home a parasite'. However, when Venice offered him two hundred ducats to remain in its service for a year, he refused, and returned home in January 1507. 

Back in Nuremberg, there were only few opportunities for any of the large-scale public commissions with which his Italian rivals made their reputations. Increasingly he abandoned painting and concentrated on graphic work. His popularity grew and in 1509 he was at last able to purchase outright the house his family had rented g for some years. After 1512 he was favored by the Holy Roman 41 Emperor Maximilian I. Darer decorated a prayer book for him, and collaborated on the creation of the Triumphal Arch, an enormous composition in the shape of an arch, made up of hundreds of separate woodcuts. In-1513 Diirer was made an honorary citizen of the Great Council of Nuremberg, an unprecedented honour for an artist working north of the Alps, and in 1515 the Emperor granted him an annuity of one hundred florins for the rest of his life. 

DIFFICULT YEARS  

Despite this public success, these were difficult years for Darer. Though his income was relatively high, his expenses quickly offset it. He spent and loaned money freely, filling his house with strange and precious objects of all kinds. His mother's death in 1514 affected him deeply, and he underwent an artistic and spiritual crisis which is reflected in his engraving Melencolia  He was still obsessed with the grandeur of the Italian achievements and in particular with the ideals of beauty and harmony which always seemed to elude him.

In 1517 Martin Luther made his first great attack on corruption in the Church, thus beginning the upheaval in European religious life that came to be known as the Reformation. Diirer read avidly Luther's writings which were passed to him by Reformers such as Philip Melanchthon, a Humanist scholar who, like Diirer himself, tried to bridge the gap between the new learning from Italy and the new piety from Germany. Luther's teachings appear to have brought Durer some relief from his inner turmoil.

When Emperor Maximilian I died in 1519, the Nuremberg Council stopped Diirer's life pension, prompting his lengthy journey to the Netherlands to meet the new Emperor and petition for the renewal of his annuity. He left Nuremberg in 1520, accompanied by his wife and maidservant. With him he took engravings and woodcuts, with which he was able to pay his way throughout his trip. He kept a detailed journal in which he recorded all his expenses and everything he saw or heard, as well as sketchbooks which he filled with drawings. Everywhere he was received by the rich and mighty and feted as the greatest German artist of his time. For Darer it was the fulfillment of his longstanding dream of raising the public status of the artist.

Along his route Direr made it his business to see the notable works of art and the important artists in each town. He made a difficult excursion to Zeeland in the wild north of the country to see and draw a whale that had been beached there, but by the time he arrived the creature had already returned to the sea. While in Zeeland, he caught some kind of fever which was to weaken him for much of the rest of his life. In Aachen he witnessed the coronation of the new Emperor, Charles V, and when the court moved to Köln his annuity was confirmed. He painted many portraits and sold many prints but so indulged his love of collecting  including such objects as tortoise-shells, parrots, coral, conch shells and ivory - that overall he made a financial loss on the trip.

Darer was in Antwerp when news arrived of Luther's arrest. He and his wife hurried home, possibly in fear of attack by pro-Catholic elements in Antwerp. They arrived in Nuremberg in August 1521, to find the city in turmoil. Friends and pupils of Darer's had been banished for heretical ideas. In the surrounding countryside discontent was mounting which would eventually explode in the Peasants' War of 1525. Darer, though careful to remain on the right side of the authorities, nonetheless expressed some sympathy for the new movements. 

In his last great painting, The Four Apostles, his deep religious feeling was perfectly combined with his love of Venetian art. He made a gift of the painting to the Council of Nuremberg in 1526, carefully inscribing it with this warning: 'All worldly rulers in these dangerous times should pay heed lest they follow' human misguidance instead of the word of God. For God will have nothing added to his word nor taken away from it.'

A TIME FOR WRITING  

Darer concentrated much of his strength in his last years on his writings. He published works on proportion, perspective, and fortification and composed his family chronicle and his memoirs. He also started, but did not live to finish, a work of advice for young artists. His old friend Pirckheimer lamented his deteriorating condition: 'He was withered like a bundle of straw and could never be a happy man or mingle with people'. On 6 April 1528, at the age of 57, in his home city of Nuremberg, Darer died of the fever he had first contracted in Zeeland. He was mourned by Melanchthon who described him as a 'wise man whose artistic talents, eminent as they were, were still.

Writer-Marshall Cavendish