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Private life of an artist: the faces of Constable
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent15 Jan 2009
HE was one of the greatest landscape artists of his day, whose rural scenes are a staple of chocolate boxes and birthday cards.
But a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery will show a more personal side of John Constable through portraits - many rarely seen.
It will include pictures of his wife, Maria Bicknell, in the early years of their romance and marriage.
Others capture their children playing in the garden where they lived in Hampstead, or being read to. Still more show local worthies in Constable's home town of East Bergholt in Suffolk, as well as family friends and a servant.
The show's curators - critic Martin Gayford and Constable expert Anne Lyles of the Tate - admit not all are works of genius but say they are fascinating nonetheless.
"Nobody is pretending that he's on a par with [portrait painters] Sir Thomas Lawrence or Sir Joshua Reynolds," Ms Lyles said. "But people may go away feeling more moved than from a conventional portrait exhibition because they're so much part of his life."
Constable, who lived from 1776 to 1837, was a slow developer in all branches of his art and some early examples of portraits - such as Master Crosby in 1808 - were not well painted.
By temperament, too, he was not well suited to the form even though it was the obvious way of making money from art at the time. "The idea of him being cooped up in a portrait studio having to make polite conversation with endless people boring the pants off him would have been anathema. Landscape always was his first love," Ms Lyles said.
But even so, Ms Lyles said it was difficult to say why his portraits were so little known. Partly it was because many remain in the hands of the sitters' descendants.
The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery will be the first to explore his life and art through his portraits. It will feature nearly 50 works, including some recent rediscoveries. The portrait of Ann, his older sister, and Mary, who was four years his junior, was painted in 1814 and completed by February 1815.
Constable married Maria not long after, in 1816, and had seven children. But she fell ill after the birth of the seventh in 1828 and died of tuberculosis in November of that year. Between them the children owned - or bought after their father's death - many of the family portraits.
