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(19 Sep 2014) LEADIN: Rolling green hills, wandering farm cattle and the quaint English countryside. London's Victoria and Albert Museum is opening a major new exhibition on British landscape painter John Constable. Best-known to many for 'The Hay Wain' - an artwork which adorns countless decorative plates and trays - the exhibition explores the artist's influences and creative processes. STORYLINE: John Constable's 'The Hay Wain', hanging in all its glory. This six-foot (183 cm) oil painting shows a wagon crossing a shallow stream, a sunny open landscape and a building nestling in the shadows of trees. It's the artist's most acclaimed work and is best-known for being used on decorative crockery and tea trays. Now, this famous work is taking pride of place in an exhibition which explores the British landscape painter's inspiration, techniques and the creative process behind some of his most famous works. Among the 150 artworks on display are Constable's famed 'six-footers', thought by some to be among the best-known images in British art. “The exhibition seeks to show that Constable - who of course is one of Britain's greatest artists - didn't simply approach nature in an unmediated way,“ says senior paintings curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Mark Evans. “He made pictures, he's a truth-teller, but he also conditioned by the great old masters of the 17th century and this is what enabled him to make paintings of the extraordinary authority of say 'The Hay Wain', which of course is now effectively an old master comparable with the Mona Lisa.“ Displayed among Constable's most famous works are close copies the artist made of paintings by old masters. Here, Constable's copy of 'Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem' by Dutch painter Jacob Van Ruisdael is displayed next to the original. The artist owned a large collection of 17th century Dutch, Flemish and French landscape painters, a valuable resource for his own image-making. It's thought the combination of his studies of their paintings and his extraordinary fidelity when sketching, created the artwork people see today. “All artists copied paintings as young men,“ says Evans. “Constable continued to copy when he was a mature Royal Academician in his 50's. He did this in order to understand those great paintings as well as he possibly could, as if to get inside the mind - spirit if you will - of the painters themselves.“ Elsewhere in the exhibition, numerous outdoor sketches by the British painter are on display. A central method to his work, it's thought Constable reinvented the technique of oil sketching - changing it from a method to record a cart or a building to a style which captures the transient effects of light and clouds. “Constable worked hard for about 20 years on oil sketching out of doors,“ says Evans. “And he turned this medium into one capable of catching the most transient and sparkling effects of nature; light shining through clouds, a sunset or sunrise, a rainstorm, and this was something quite new.“ The artist was born in the rural east of England in 1776. He was the son of a farmer and mill owner, and grew up working in the family business, all the time growing intimately familiar with the countryside. It was there where he first sketched observations of nature and the scenery. Having gained permission from his father, he later travelled to London in 1799 to study at the Royal Academy of Arts. But it was the understanding he forged as a young man which makes his landscape paintings so insightful, according to Evans. “He understood how lochs worked, how windmills went round,“ he says. Find out more about AP Archive: Twitter: Facebook: Instagram: You can license this story through AP Archive:
