John Constable never left England. So much of how he painted and thought about the world can be explained by this basic fact. In 1803, aged 26, he went on a trip along the Kent coast \u2013 the closest he would get to going abroad \u2013 with the enthusiasm of a man stepping foot for the first time in the new world. \u201cI saw all sorts of weather\u201d, he wrote. \u201cSome the most delightful, and some as melancholy.\u201d<\/p>\n
This trip was an exception. For most of his life he moved between three points: Suffolk, Hampstead and Brighton. While his great rival JMW Turner, one year his senior, travelled across France and Italy, Constable took pleasure in being parochial. \u201cI am sure you will laugh\u201d, he told his wife, Maria, but \u201cI have found another very promising subject at Flatford Mill\u201d.<\/p>\n
For fans of Constable \u2013 who today celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth \u2013 this interest in England and Englishness is part of his charm. Just by looking at a field of grass, he could work out which part of the season he was in, almost to the day. If you\u2019re drawn to that kind of thing, then you are bound to find Constable fascinating. Others (like me) may be put off by his somewhat patrician perspective: a landowner surveying a plot in which everyone is busy at work, driving cows or ploughing fields.<\/p>\n
This small show at Hampstead\u2019s Burgh House offers something like an olive branch to Constable haters. The main works on display are three mezzotint prints done with such delicacy that the black ink becomes translucent in sections where it is used to depict clouds, and an oil study for his painting Hampstead Heath With a Rainbow<\/a>.<\/p>\n Something for the Constable-curious \u2026 John Constable and David Lucas\u2019s A Heath, 1831. Photograph: Constable<\/p>\n