Constable

Published by the Yale Center for British Art

Hardcover 128 Pages, 113 color illus.
ISBN 9780300284669

Tim Barringer
With a contribution by Nicholas Robbins 

Publication date: September 16, 2025

Description

John Constable (1776–1837) is celebrated today as one of Britain’s greatest painters. While his depictions of the Suffolk countryside have become icons of Englishness, his work is of international importance. Constable’s dynamic, expressive style — rooted in direct observation — revolutionized the artistic representation of the natural world and exerted a profound influence on later generations of artists, from Eugène Delacroix and the Impressionists to Lucian Freud.

This generously illustrated volume — the third installment in the YCBA Collection Series (following Turner and Blake) — situates Constable within the culture of his time and considers his rich legacy through the museum’s extensive holdings. Leading historian of British art Tim Barringer surveys Constable’s practice across media and genres, tracing the artist’s response to landscape traditions and revealing the potent commentary on social change woven into his evocative rural scenes. Nicholas Robbins, whose scholarship investigates the relationship between art and environmental science, explores Constable’s cloud studies in the context of nineteenth-century discourses on climate. As this publication reveals, the issues with which Constable’s art contends are as relevant today as they were in his lifetime.