Stop and Look – John Constable’s Hadleigh Castle (1829)

We are standing on the hilly north shore of the Thames estuary, looking out to sea. A man with a stick and bright red waistcoat is walking with his collie dog towards two gaunt ruined towers that stand as a kind of gateway into the glistening panorama of clouds and water beyond. Immediately below, some cows are grazing on a steep slope, their herdsman lolling nearby. Between us and the view, seagulls hover, defining the airy space in which the landscape is set. 

Yes, perhaps this is not so much a landscape as a skyscape – a study of clouds and light placed firmly (and yet infinitely freely) in a huge three-dimensional setting. John Constable pioneered the habit of painting small studies of skies, records of all sorts of meteorological conditions; one commentator has called this picture “an enormous sky study in its own right”. Our eyes can penetrate beyond the ruins to the distant tower of Southend church or over the brilliantly lit water to the north coast of Kent. 

He had painted a full-size oil sketch of the subject that the National Gallery acquired in London under the impression that it was the final work, and indeed by modern standards, it seems to contain all that the subject requires. What’s miraculous is that, in this finished version, Constable has succeeded in retaining all the fluidity and energy of the sketch. There’s none of the deadness, the flatness, of a picture that’s been overworked. 

Hadleigh, on the coast of southern Essex, is not a place where Constable regularly worked: we associate him with his native north Essex-Suffolk border, with Hampstead Heath and with Brighton. He had been to Hadleigh before, in 1814, and people have suggested that he thought of these ruins as gloomy and forbidding, reverting to them as a suitable image by which he could express his grief at his wife’s death in 1828. 

But even if the weather of Hadleigh Castle is, let’s say, unsettled, it isn’t threatening thunder and lightning. (I once witnessed, a mile out at the tip of Southend Pier, five simultaneous thunderstorms over different parts of the estuary.) The mood of the picture is troubled, perplexed, certainly. Still, its subject, surely, is that irrepressible gleam of the sun in the very centre of the composition, breaking through the gloom and brightening the distant horizon.  

Constable’s landscapes are pictures about landscape, the multitudinous variety of nature he took infinite delight in, and regarded as a challenge to his professional skill. But he felt these marvels so deeply, so personally, that while he took great pains to render in pigment what he saw about him, when we look at his work, we can’t help reading his emotions into it. Using paint as a way of feeling, he can be seen clearly in works like this one as the very first of the moderns.  

Another of his big exhibition pictures, The Hay Wain, was one of three by Constable that won a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1824, and in the years following, his paintings were often to be seen in the stock of Paris dealers.

 His innovative technique became familiar to French artists, who absorbed it into their aesthetic vocabulary. It fed into the work of the Fontainebleau school and thence to the Impressionists. Constable got there first! (Not Turner: that’s another story.)