John Constable (English, 1776-1837) - ‘A Cottage in a Cornfield’, 1817

Picture-perfect homes in Constable Country

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John Constable loved the Stour Valley. Born in the village of East Bergholt in Suffolk, east England, in 1776, the artist barely travelled to — let alone painted — another place. “I associate my ‘careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour,” he wrote in 1821. “As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such places.”

‘The Mill Stream’ (1814-15) by John Constable ©…

Picture-perfect homes in Constable Country

[ad_1] John Constable loved the Stour Valley. Born in the village of East Bergholt in Suffolk, east England, in 1776, the artist barely travelled to — let alone painted — another place. “I associate my ‘careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour,” he wrote in 1821. “As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such places.” ‘The Mill Stream’ (1814-15) by John Constable ©…

Happy 240th birthday, John Constable!  Remember that time Ngaio Marsh wrote about you in A Clutch of Constables?  Beautiful Suffolk!

 - Just as a tune remains the same whatever the key it is played in, so we respond to light intervals, to what have been called ‘gradients’ rather than to the measurable quantity of light reflected from any given object... 

A cloud passing over the sun would change its brightness, and so might even a tilt of the head, or an approach from a different angle. If what we call ‘identity’ were not anchored in a constant relationship with the environment, it would be lost in the chaos of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves... 

What we get on the retina, is a welter of dancing points stimulating the sensitive rods and cones that fire their messages into the brain. What we see is a stable world. It takes an effort of the imagination and a fairly complex apparatus to realise the tremendous gulf between the two. Consider any object, such as a book or a piece of paper. When we scan it with our eyes it projects upon our two retinas a restless, flitting pattern of light of various wave lengths and intensities. This pattern will hardly ever repeat itself exactly - the angle which we look, the light,  the size of our pupils, all these will have changed. The white light a piece of paper reflects when turned toward the window is a multiple of what it reflects when turned away. It is not that we do not notice some change; indeed, we must if we want to form an estimate of the illumination. But we are never conscious of the objective degree of all these changes unless we use what psychologists call a ‘reduction screen’, in essence a peephole that makes us see a speck of colour but masks off its relationships... 

The term which psychology has coined for our relative imperviousness to the dizzy variations that go on in the world around is ‘constancy’...  

Other wise our capacity to make allowances, to infer relationships alone, is astounding...

Without this faculty of man and beast alike to recognise identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions and to preserve the frame work of a stable world, art could not exist... 

Every time we meet with an unfamiliar type of transposition, there is a brief moment of shock and a period of adjustment - but it is an adjustment for which the mechanism exists in us. - 

Gombrich, E. H., 1960. Art & Illusion, A Study in The Psychology of Pictorial Representation . 6th ed. London: Phaidon Press Limited .

Dedham Vale from Langham, 1811. Graphite on paper. 1811. Yale Center For British Art. YCBA/lido-TMS-8081

Dedham Vale from Langham, 1813. Graphite on paper. 1811. Yale Center For British Art. YCBA/lido-TMS-8077

Dedham from Langham, 1813. Oil on canvas. Tate. N02654