UNIT 3
Dedham Vale
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.
Dedham Vale is a picture (1802) of a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on the Essex-Suffolk border in east England. The river is the key landscape focus for the valley, its course is defined by bank side trees and wet meadows. It is part of the area known since the artist's lifetime as Constable Country, as it was made famous by the paintings of John Constable.
The picture is a good example of the artist’s realistic depiction of the English countryside. Constable noticed lovely greens of the valley and painted them as he saw them. The picture is based on a careful study of what he saw – not only trees, field, river bank, but of the way they are effected by human use and by wind and all natural forces. To accomplish the aim of rendering the moving quality of nature he used broken touches of colour. The sparkles of light and colour and the deliberate roughness of textures broke with the tradition of smooth painting
His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied. Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.