1776-1837 British John Constable Locations 1837). English painter and draughtsman. His range and aspirations were less extensive than those of his contemporary J. M. W. Turner, but these two artists have traditionally been linked as the giants of early 19th-century British landscape painting and isolated from the many other artists practising landscape at a time when it was unprecedentedly popular. Constable has often been defined as the great naturalist and deliberately presented himself thus in his correspondence, although his stylistic variety indicates an instability in his perception of what constituted nature. He has also been characterized as having painted only the places he knew intimately, which other artists tended to pass by. While the exclusivity of Constable approach is indisputable, his concern with local scenery was not unique, being shared by the contemporary Norwich artists. By beginning to sketch in oil from nature seriously in 1808, he also conformed with the practice of artists such as Thomas Christopher Hofland (1777-1843), William Alfred Delamotte, Turner and, particularly, the pupils of John Linnell. Turner shared his commitment to establishing landscape as the equal of history painting, despite widespread disbelief in this notion. Nevertheless, although Constable was less singular than he might have liked people to believe, his single-mindedness in portraying so limited a range of sites was unique, and the brilliance of his oil sketching unprecedented, while none of his contemporaries was producing pictures resembling The Haywain (1821; London, N.G.) or the Leaping Horse (1825; London, RA). This very singularity was characteristic of British artists at a time when members of most occupations were stressing their individuality in the context of a rapidly developing capitalist economy  Related Paintings of John Constable :. | Old Sarum | View towards the rectory | Golding Constable-s Flower Garden | Flatford Mill from a lock on the Stour | Das Haus des Admirals in Hampstead |
Related Artists:
CAPORALI, Bartolomeo
Italian painter, Umbrian school (b. ca. 1420, Perugia, d. 1505, Perugia)
Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps
(March 3, 1803 - August 22, 1860) was a French painter. He was born in Paris. In his youth he travelled in the East, and reproduced Oriental life and scenery with a bold fidelity to nature that puzzled conventional critics. His powers, however, soon came to be recognized, and he was ranked along with Delacroix and Vernet as one of the leaders of the French school. At the Paris Exhibition of 1855 he received the grand or council medal. Most of his life was passed in the neighborhood of Paris. He was fond of animals, especially dogs, and indulged in all kinds of field sports. He died in 1860 in consequence of being thrown from a horse while hunting at Fontainebleau. Decamps' style was characteristically and intensely French. It was marked by vivid dramatic conception, bold and even rough brushstrokes, and startling contrasts of color and of light and shade. His subjects embraced an unusually wide range. He availed himself of his travels in the East in dealing with scenes from Scripture history, which he was probably the first of European painters to represent with their true and natural local background. Of this class were his Joseph sold by his Brethren, Moses taken from the Nile, and his scenes from the life of Samson, nine vigorous sketches in charcoal and white. Perhaps the most impressive of his historical pictures is Defeat of the Cimbri, representing the conflict between a horde of barbarians and a disciplined army. Decamps produced a number of genre pictures, chiefly scenes from French and Algerian domestic life, the most marked feature of which is humour. The same characteristic attaches to many of his numerous animal paintings; Decamps was especially fond of painting monkeys. His well-known painting The Monkey Connoisseurs satirizes the jury of the French Academy of Painting, which had rejected several of his earlier works on account of their divergence from any known standard.
James Augustus Suydam
(1819-1865) architect, lawyer, and artist; as an artist was considered one of the premier Luminism painters. He is widely known as an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School. James Augustus Suydam was descended from an old New York Dutch merchant family. He graduated from New York University (then the University of the City of New York), and began his career as a businessman but turned a significant portion of his energies to painting, studying under famed artist and portrait painter Minor C. Kellogg. At the age of thirty he was elected to the Century Association. One of the "regulars" who gathered to paint at North Conway, New Hampshire, he exhibited Conway Meadows at the New York Athenaeum and Boston Athenaeum. He opened his studio at the noted 10th Street Studio Building, New York City, in 1858. The following year he was elected an honorary professional member in the prestigious National Academy of Design, which granted him full membership in 1861. He died suddenly in North Conway at the age of 46. James Suydam was described by his friend, the accomplished artist Sanford Robinson Gifford as a "thoroughly educated and accomplished man. " In addition to his work as an artist, which he began only after working in law and architecture, he was widely read and well-versed in history, philosophy, and the sciences. His work as a landscape painter reflects this breadth of knowledge and reveals Suydam as a deeply spiritual individual. Using his familiarity with science, Suydam reduced nature to calm, clean, planar forms, and then distorted proportional relations so that God's creations loomed superior over the work of man. The National Academy has most of his works such as Paradise Rocks (1865), and the Taft family's Taft Museum also holds works. The Taft also has a podcast website for this artist. A painting of Gifford's from 1859 which Suydam, according to a report, "donated to the [National] academy in 1865," became the subject of a deaccession controversy at the Academy in late 2008.