Constable: The Painter and his Landscape (1983)

John Constable’s most important paintings were of a relatively small area of East Anglia, where he was born and where he spent the first twenty years of his life. These unassuming scenes form the basis of our understanding of the history of landscape painting and of British art, and are the central concern of this book.

Michael Rosenthal has drawn extensively on the published and unpublished documentation about Constable and his circle to consider such matters as the relationship between Constable’s painting and contemporary literature, and the effect of the artist’s local background on his perception of landscape. His last theme encompasses not only a comparison of the paintings with the landscapes that they represent but also an analysis of how Constable’s own position as a member of a rural middle-class landowner affected the way he saw the landscape—what he considered worth noticing, for instance—and how these perceptions changed.

Rosenthal’s lavishly illustrated book provides the first detailed historical and biographical study of the most important group of Constable’s paintings. Its close attention to the social and economic developments of the era throws a new and illuminating light on these beautiful paintings.