Constable, Hadleigh Castle

People out with the help of full-size compositional sketches, and work on this scale concentrated Constable's attention as never before on purely painterly considerations. By the mid 1820s topography and even verisimilitude had ceased to play a determining role. He became increasingly reluctant to sell his work (his private income ensured him a living), and he seems, like Turner, to have planned a museum to house his collection. In the event, the bulk of his studio, including an incomparable series of oil sketches, was presented in the 1880s to the Royal Academy by his daughter.

In 1829 Constable was made a full Academician,, and the last years of his life were largely spent in consolidating his reputation, by the publication of a series of engravings by David Lucas (1802-81) after his work. English Landscape Scenery with ample commentaries by the artist himself. He also took to lecturing on the subject of the history and practice of landscape.

Although Constable was never a popular painter until after his death, and was rarely commissioned to paint anything but portraits and even religious works, his posthumous biography by C.R.Leslie assured his fame, and led to a good deal of interest in his work in the following decades.

It is an irony that a painter who prided himself on never travelling abroad, and who despised modern art on the Continent, should have had an important following in France, from the early 1820s, and even in Germany from about 10 years later, Leslie's picture of a benign and dedicated "natural painter⁵¹ shaped the reception of Constable until very recent research revealed a much more aggressively ambitious personality.

Art

William Hogarth (1697-1762) was the dominant artistic personality in England in the first half of the 18c and the painter who did most to make a reality of the idea of a distinctive English school. Among other achievements he established the new genre of Modern Moral Subject, in which a story from contemporary life is told in a series of paintings which were subsequently engraved. In recent years his great gifts as a painter have, become Increasingly evident, though in previous centuries his fame rested almost entirely on his, engravings.

A man of many contradictions he was, like his father-in-law Thornhill, a shrewd careerist, but he was also deeply vulnerable to criticism; prone to high spirits but also melancholic. These contra­dic­tions can partly be explained by his upbringing as the son of a bankrupt author and schoolmaster, which obliged him to enter in 1713 the lowest rung of the artistic profession as an apprentice to a silver engraver. He set up as an independent engraver in 1720, enrolling also at the Vanderbank Academy, where he met well-known painters and picked up some instruction in drawing. In the 1720s he rose steadily through his profession, making funeral tickets, book illustrations and social and political satires. Having his eye set on higher things, however, he learned, perhaps from Thornhill, enough painting technique to make rapid progress on his own, and by 1729 he had achieved a major success with a painting of The Beggar's Opera which he was obliged to repeat at least 5 times (Tate; Yale BAG; etc.)

This success gained him further applause. Restless as ever for fame he tells us that he embarked on painting and Engraving modern moral subjects a Field unbroken up in any Country or any Age, beginning with "A Harlot's Progress" (1730-32) which told in a series of 6 paintings (now lost) the tragic story of a country girl who fell for the temptations of city life. The engravings had an immediate success through their humour.

Hogarth Captain Thomas Coram, 1740 pathos and topicality, and they were followed by the paintings of The Rake's Progress (1733). The Rake himself was, like the Harlot, a vehicle for exposing the corruption and foolish­ness of polite society and its hangers-on: aristocrats, merchants, doc­tors, lawyers, clergy­men and foreigners. With the even greater success that followed his second series Hogart branched out, making paintings of London life in the Four Times of Day; portraits, culminating in the spectacular one of Captain Coram (1740) and, surprisingly, decorative paintings in the manner of Thornhill.

In the 1740s Hogarth became increasingly preoccupied with answering the suggestion (not as widespread as he thought) that he was merely a comic painter. Witt the support of the novelist Henry Fielding he proclaimed himself 'Comic History Painter' an dissociated himself from the genres like caricature; the result was the most accomplished of the moral cycles. Marriage-a-la-Moc (c.1753) in which the figures are painted with French elegance which in turn is satirized in i association with the affectation aristocratic life.

Other series were direct towards cruelty and the effects gin.

In the 1750s he became target of caricature himself a attacks on satire in general; In response was morbid depression and apocalyptic feelings of nation decline. Yet his painting became more sensuous than ever.

By the end of his life he felt to be overtaken by the urbanity such artists as Reynolds, but showing that a painter could be man of intellect and wit he made possible the elevated posit that painting was to enjoy in next generation. Furthermore, using engraving he had shown way for artists to sure economically by appealing in public beyond the narrow connoisseurs. He had no pupils.

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