Is Constable an artist of nostalgia?

This is a story of an artist in his time, and the unexpected ways in which his works, and the ideas on which they were based, have been transformed in the present-day to mean something quite different.  First, look at the sketch above: Barges on the Stour at Flatford Lock, painted around 1810. It has an immediacy, a capturing of a natural effect, that is remarkable for that date. Yet Constable is famous with the public not for this kind of thing but for The Haywain: 

Is Constable’s an art of nostalgia? Like other cultural figures that are appropriated as embodying a national tradition, Constable cannot be held entirely guilty for the ideas attached to his works. What looks to us today like a rural idyll was a working landscape. Nonetheless, the scenes celebrated by Constable are a very specific rural, non-industrial vision of the world.

Constable’s work, and his modern reputation, seem to be the result of a two-way tension:

Firstly, Constable created remarkable sketches, both in pencil and in oil, of landscapes and scenes that he observed. Much of what he saw involved clouds and their formations.

Secondly, Constable craved the success of public approval. This could only be obtained by exhibiting large-scale works at the Royal Academy and elsewhere; the small oil sketches would not be accepted. But to create the large-scale works, it seems that Constable lost the wonderful freshness of his oil sketches, even though the larger works are based on the smaller versions.  His big six-foot canvases were not painted at or near the sites portrayed. In any case, you can’t do a six-foot canvas from nature.

How did the second Constable emerge from the first? According to the caption in the V&A, Constable’s Watermeadows near Salisbury, painted 1820 or 1829, was shown to the Royal Academy but was criticised as “a nasty green thing”, at which point Constable withdrew it. That seems to me to summarise Constable’s achievement and limitation. The pictures that were accepted by the Academy were the wrong ones; those that were rejected, like this one, are the truly innovative ones.

“Constable is a painter of the particular rather than the general, the actual, rather than the ideal” (John Sunderland, Constable, 1971). But I don’t think that is quite true. The failure of C is that he did not stick to this principle. His famous paintings (The Haywain) are much less impressive than the studies painted in preparation for it. I saw today in the V&A some of Constable’s oil sketches, and they are a revelation – so different to the dreary formal landscapes of the 19th century. They appear to be very accurate renditions of the landscape, unlike the more formal exhibition pieces, that rearrange parts of the view.

Today’s British public wants an artist like Constable so that it can find reassuring images of a mythical rural tradition. Hence the transmutation of the first Constable to the second was very much in keeping with what the general public want today.  So to answer the question, Is Constable’s the art of nostalgia, I believe in his finished exhibition works, the answer is yes; in the more honest sketches, that is not the case.