Late Constable, review: it’s hard to imagine a more invigorating display of bravura painting

It’s been a long time coming. Although he studied at its Schools, and was eventually elected to its ranks, John Constable, the subject of a new exhibition at Burlington Gardens, has never been honoured with a monographic show at the Royal Academy – a reminder, perhaps, of the snobbery he endured while flying the flag for lowly landscape painting, which wasn’t taken seriously until he (and his contemporary and rival, Turner) came along. Constable wasn’t made a full Academician until 1829, by which time he was already in his fifties. And, even then, he was promptly snubbed by the RA’s president, Thomas Lawrence, who told him he was lucky. So, high time for the RA to make amends.

Today, of course, Constable suffers from snobbery of a different kind, dismissed as a chocolate-box artist whose inoffensive scenes, offering a hackneyed, pastoral vision of Old England, are endlessly reproduced on crockery, tea towels, and tourist tat. This conventional view, though, is wrong. Scrape away the prejudices that, over time, have tarnished Constable’s oeuvre, and, gleaming underneath, you discover a fiercely experimental modern artist.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the rejuvenation of painting in contemporary art. Well, it’s difficult to imagine a more invigorating display of bravura painting than this exhibition focusing on the last 12 years of Constable’s life, leading up to his unexpected death, aged 60, in 1837. It also contains a room of brilliant works on paper, including the artist’s famous watercolour of Stonehenge, several astonishing, apocalyptic wash studies of his beloved Suffolk landscapes, and a swift, vigorous pen-and-ink sketch, which I loved, featuring a wounded stag in woodland.

The usual line about late Constable is that the death from tuberculosis in 1828 of his wife, Maria, precipitated a radical change of direction in his work. The mood of his compositions became more sombre, his brushwork increasingly tumultuous and expressive.

The show at the RA argues that it is another cliché to attribute this to the grief experienced by Constable, who was left to look after seven children, all under the age of 12. (As a parent of three sprogs, I can’t help feeling it’s a miracle that he ever picked up a paintbrush again.) Accordingly, it begins a little earlier, with The Leaping Horse (1825), the last in the series of “six-footers” depicting the banks of the River Stour, which also included The Hay Wain (1821), and made Constable’s name.

Lucian Freud once described The Leaping Horse as “the greatest painting in the world”. I’m not sure I agree – to me, the cob jumping a towpath barrier looks as if he’s resting on his knees, like a barfly shimmying up to the counter for another drink. Still, the flecked, encrusted surface, especially in the accompanying full-size oil sketch, with its bruised, pummelled cloud approaching like the manifestation of a bad smell, certainly supports the show’s thesis that, prior to Maria’s death, big changes in Constable’s approach were already afoot.

Nearby, we find the rest of the canvases from the second half of the 1820s which Constable showed at the Royal Academy’s Annual (now Summer) Exhibition, including Dedham Vale (1828), with the village’s distinctive church tower in the distance. Across the foreground, speckles of ochre paint sprout like lichen, helping to summon a sense of the squelchy English countryside. Constable’s inspiration was a landscape by the 17th-century painter Claude, but, characteristically, he replaced his model’s golden Italian tranquillity with something more bracing. He was always suspicious of painting’s superficial charms, which he called “eye-salve”, and, if his art had a taste, it would be savoury, not sweet.

There are atypical vistas, too: his underrated, contrarily unsentimental view of Brighton’s up-to-the-minute chain pier, its strand a beachcomber’s paradise of pebbles and shells and glistening treasures of the deep; a view of the melancholic ruins of Hadleigh Castle overlooking the Thames estuary, with an almost odoriferous saline tang, and birds slathered in paint so thick, like gulls beset by an oil slick, that it’s a surprise they can flap their wings at all.

If Turner is a painter of light, another cliché goes, Constable is earthbound: an artist of brambles and bracken, mud and silt, who once declared his love for “old rotten Banks, slimy posts and brickwork”. Yet, as his closely observed cloud studies reveal, he spent as much time looking up at the skies as down into mucky dells and tangled brush, and his mature paintings typically include great celestial dramas, as sunshine and moisture and windy gusts duke it out. Inside the exhibition, I counted at least nine rainbows, each glowing like a neon lamp.

Late Constable, you see, isn’t about recording the appearance of specific scenes, but about using the materiality of paint to evoke changeable British climatic conditions and the experience of being outside. Consider his oil sketch of a rainstorm at sea, superbly summoned with bold, quick strokes, looking at which is like turning on a shower; another extraordinary painting has dense white highlights as thick and sticky as goat’s cheese. Ingeniously, Constable painted as much for the ear as the eye, suggesting ambient soundtracks of rushing water, or the creak of a barge’s rope upon a post.

Yes, in the final room, there are unfortunate omissions, such as Tate’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831), which happens to be on loan in Shanghai. But it doesn’t matter. These are blustery, exhilarating paintings that make you want to leave the city far behind.

​From Sat until February 13 2022. Details: 020 7300 8090​; royalacademy.org.uk