John Constable, always a household name, still stands shy of the international stage. Although he warrants this major new biography; he sits, with Stubbs, Turner, and Gainsborough, as a key element of the quadrumvirate of the British school of modern painting, one of the four early fathers of our national pictorial church.
Hamilton seeks here to unpick the over-worn view of Constable as the proto-French plein air Impressionist landscapist and furnishes an elegant portrait of the man, and of his times. He draws freely on surviving correspondence with his friend and patron, Bishop John Fisher, as well as on the reliably published biographical memoirs of the fellow painter CR Leslie which appeared only six years after Constable’s death.
