John Constable Quotes about Art

John Constable was a famous English painter and watercolorist associated with the Romanticism art movement. He is best known for his landscape paintings of the English countryside. Famous John Constable artworks include “Wivenhoe Park”, “Dedham Vale”, “The Hay Wain”, “Weymouth Bay”, “The White Horse”, “Hadleigh Castle”, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows”, “Stonehenge”, “View on the Stour near Dedham”, “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, 18 June 1817”, “The Leaping Horse” and “Stratford Mill”.

Mini biography: Born John Constable on the 11th of June, 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk, England. His mother was Ann Watts and his father Golding Constable was a corn merchant. Constable married Maria Elizabeth Bicknell in 1816 and they had seven children: John-Charles, Maria-Louisa, Charles-Golding, Isabel, Emily, Alfie, and Lionel-Bicknell Constable. His wife Maria died in 1828 at the age 41, just months after giving birth to their seventh child. The artist died on the 31st of March, 1837 in London, England at the age of 60. John Constable is buried at the St John-at-Hampstead Church in Hampstead, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain.

List of Famous John Constable Art Quotes

I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavor to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me. John Constable

That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. John Constable

No man who can do any one thing well will be able to any different thing equally well. John Constable

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture. John Constable

But You know, Landscape is my mistress — ‘t is to her that I look for fame — and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man. John Constable

I have been living a hermit-life, though always with my pencil in my hand. How much real delight have I had with the study of landscape this summer! Either I am myself improved in the art of seeing nature, which Sir Joshua call painting, or nature has unveiled her beauties to me less fastidiously. Perhaps there is something of both, so we will divide the compliment. John Constable

There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. John Constable

My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular? John Constable

For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind — but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men. John Constable

Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate “my careless boyhood” with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture (The White Horse) is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it. John Constable

The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period. John Constable

I am most anxious to get into my London painting-room, for I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas. I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest. John Constable

Certainly, if the sky is ‘obtrusive,’ (as mine are) it is bad, but if they are ‘evaded’ (as mine are not) it is worse, they must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the ‘key note,’ the ‘standard of Scale’ and the chief ‘Organ of sentiment.’ You may conceive, then, what a “white sheet” would do for me, impressed as I am with these notions. John Constable

He seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent, and so airy. John Constable

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught. John Constable

Hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel – God only knows how my children will be brought up… the face of the World is totally changed to me. John Constable

Art Quotes About John Constable

Constable, an admirable man, is one of England’s glories. I have already told you about him and about the impression he had made on me when I was making ‘The massacre at Chios’. He and Turner were real reformers. They broke out of the rut of traditional landscape painting. Eugène Delacroix Quotes

John Constable Self-Portrait Drawing

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Related or similar popular artists and creatives include: John Ruskin, Gustave Courbet, JMW Turner and other Famous British Artists.