The Art of Seeing Nature: The Oil Sketches of John Constable is modestly, perhaps too modestly, called a display of some 50 oil sketches created by Constable between c. 1800 and the mid-1830s. Arranged over three rooms in an elegant linear hanging on mid-blue background, this is a quietly impressive and intelligent curatorial work. The V&A has a large and homogeneous collection of Constable’s oil sketches, largely thanks to a generous gift from his last surviving child, Isabel (1822–88). In 1888, a few months before her death, she sent a moving letter to the museum, offering ‘some landscape sketches by J. Constable R.A.’, apologising for not having framed them, ‘as they would look so much better’. In total she bequeathed to the Kensington Museum, as it was then, 92 oil sketches, nearly 300 drawings and three sketchbooks. 

Isabel Constable‘s surprisingly modest tone is not only indicative of her character but also of the artistic and aesthetic value assigned to these sketches in the Victorian era. These are rapidly executed studies, almost none of them meant for exhibition, and, with a few exceptions, shunning realistic detail. Instead, we see a painter capturing fleeting natural phenomena and changing atmospheric conditions, such as rainbows, crepuscular dusk or dawn light, or dramatic cloud formations throwing large shadows over a landscape. Here we see an artist gathering visual material, roughly outlining the setting, creating a composition formed by a chromatic layout and basic structures. Shadows and light both create and convey atmosphere, with people, buildings and objects mere props. The application of the oil paint in rapid visible brush strokes is a suitable technique for conveying the movement created by rain, wind and storms. Most of the sketches were executed in the open and thus stand in the eighteenth-century tradition of sketching from nature, fuelled and inspired by ideas and ideals of the picturesque and the desire to capture images of the Grand Tour. Constable is clearly interested in atmospheric conditions and harmonious compositions, but he remains firmly on home ground: all of the sketches depict British landscapes and subjects. 

These impressionistic sketches with their abstract tendencies appeal to a twenty-first-century gallery visitor, but they are unlikely to have met the same approval from a Victorian visitor. The paintings have a decidedly unfinished quality, in both execution and physical appearance. Motifs and compositions that the visitor might be familiar with from having seen large-scale, finished exhibition pieces by Constable are here presented with his work stripped down, reduced to chromatic layouts. Most of the sketches are not much larger than an A4 sheet, and, while some resemble larger paintings in miniature, others show one or two aspects or iconographical elements of a finished piece. This is most obvious in the cloud and tree studies, as well as sketches of objects we later find in well-known exhibition works, such as the horse cart from The Stour Valley and Dedham Village.

The display is structured roughly chronologically but predominantly thematically, allowing visitors approaching the exhibition rooms from different parts of the vast V&A building to understand and enjoy it without strictly following the chronological route: 1. Apprenticeship (1800-9); 2. East Bergholt: Sketching from Nature (1809-21); 3. Sketches and Exhibition Paintings (1819-28); 4. Hampstead (1820-34); 5. Salisbury (1820-9); 6. Brighton (1824-8); 7. The Last Decade (with the last sketch dating from 1833-6). 

The groupings are chosen with a very good curatorial understanding and knowledge of Constable’s biography and artistic development. The time-pressed visitor will be able to identify certain subject matter and similarities of technique in the groupings, while a longer gallery visit and consultation of the labels and panels will provide detailed and well-researched commentary on each individual sketch and where it fits into the large canon of Constable’s work. The Hampstead sketches, for example, are a lesson in how Constable used the sky and cloud formations as key elements in most of his larger works, and this can be appreciated by standing back and contemplating the sketches in their collective display, with the curator’s comments providing more academic context. Constable’s cloud sketches are hugely popular and some have recently been seen in other exhibitions (for example in Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape at the Royal Academy; see review for BSECS by John Chu), but a display of many of his Brighton sketches from 1824 to 1828 is a rare occurrence. These take over an entire wall of one of the rooms and are perhaps the greatest surprise of the display. Constable was not impressed with the urban buzz of Brighton itself and his visits were tainted by his wife’s illness. Whereas the one large exhibition piece to have come out of his Brighton visits, The Chain Pier, Brighton (1827), includes a cityscape, he turns his back on the town in his sketches and embraces the South Downs, the sea, the beach and the sky, creating emotive seascapes in which small figures are placed to add to the beauty and drama of the landscape and ships add a picturesque quality to the composition.  

Another masterstroke of the display is a change in scale: the recently cleaned full-scale sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse are included and surprise the visitor in an adjoining room, providing yet more insight into Constable’s working methods and the subtleties of his use of colour, light and shade. Here the visitor instantly understands how meticulous Constable was about composition, while being able to see how he applied pure pigment to the canvas with a palette knife. 

It is the intense and highly visible materiality of the sketches that makes this display so impressive and successful. The nature of oil paint and its quick application gives these sketches a three-dimensional quality that we might not expect from typical landscape sketches of Constable’s period. Moreover, as oil paint does not fade when exposed to light, the colours are brighter and more intense than in watercolours of the same age. The sketches are made on a variety of supports, ranging from thick paper sheets (often stuck together) to panel or roughly cut pieces of canvas. Constable often prepared the ground with a layer of colour and pinned several sheets to a board. The sketches are almost all uniformly and elegantly framed with floating mounts, revealing the rough edges, pin holes, missing sections of paint, tears and other signs of how they were created. These are imperfections a Victorian visitor would not have approved of, but they tell us more about Constable’s working methods and the history of landscape painting than many a finished piece. The accompanying publication, British Watercolours 1750-1950 by Katherine Coombs, concludes with a chapter on the technical and material aspect of Constable’s oil sketches.

‘So Peculiarly English’: Topographical Watercolours from the V&A Collection overlapped with the Constable display with regard to some of the subject matter of the works, but faced some challenges regarding exhibition space and artists’ material. This display was given a somewhat difficult corridor space, with both sides lined with approximately twenty double-spaced vertical glass cabinets with low lighting appropriate for works on paper. 

The quotation used in the title is from the book A Century of English Painters (1866) by Samuel and Richard Redgrave, who dared to define painting in watercolour as ‘a national art’. Nearly 150 years later Coombs alludes in British Watercolours 1750-1950 to the association of Britain with water – both surrounded by and drenched in it – and sees a possible causal connection between these geographical and atmospheric conditions and the successful paint medium. The curatorial challenge here was to make a case for and explain the Englishness of English watercolour painting in a restricted space, with the large V&A collection to choose from. The curator decided on a strictly thematic layout of the display, without much concern for chronology, apart from the last couple of cabinets containing twentieth-century examples and subject matter. The majority of the themes were allocated one display case with two works each, with Turner, Cotman and Constable singled out as artists of particular importance. 

The architecture of the display space informed the layout and experience of the display: the visitor had little choice but to follow the layout in a linear fashion, which might have been one of the reasons why the curator favoured a more visual and stimulating approach to a chronological display. The themes were ‘Turner’, ‘Mapping Britain’, ‘Landscape and Cityscape’, ‘Property, Patrons and Friends’, ‘Antiquarian Interest’, ‘Watercolour into Print’, ‘Personal Observations’ (focusing on Cotman and Constable), ‘Recreating Nature’, ‘Industry’, and ‘New Horizons’. The choices made to illustrate each theme, phase and aspect of the great history of British watercolours were refreshing in their unpredictability, one advantage of having a large collection to choose from and the necessity for short-term display of light-sensitive watercolours. Thus the visitor saw not necessarily the very best representative works in every single cabinet, but often the most instructive examples. This was a small, short-term display in an awkward space that nevertheless proposed and explained a thematic history of the excellence of a ‘peculiarly English’ art form. 

‘The Art of Seeing Nature: The Oil Sketches of John Constable’ is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, from 17 December 2012 to 22 September 2013.

‘‘So Peculiarly English’: Topographical Watercolours from the V&A Collection’ was at the Victoria & Albert Museum from 7 June 2012 to 12 March 2013.